IT BOASTS of being everything everywhere.

But in Oxfordshire superfast internet connectivity on mobile phones which launched today won’t be available across most of the county.

The new 4G service – five times faster than existing 3G technology – will be limited to Oxford city centre and the area bordered by Kidlington, Cassington, Botley, Boars Hill, Littlemore, Cowley, Wheatley, Beckley and Islip.

Businesses and residents beyond those boundaries will not be able to access the service for up to 18 months, because masts need upgrading, which has led to criticism from experts.

Hugo Pickering, of campaign group Cotswolds Broadband, which is actively raising funds to introduce the service to rural west Oxfordshire, said: “The trouble with wireless services is they don’t fix the problem for anything other than urban areas, because the costs are so great to put in mobile masts around the county.

“4G is very much an urban solution, rather than a rural proposition. The fact that we haven’t even got 3G in West Oxfordshire underlines the problem.

“I doubt whether it will be viable for them – it will be a long-term programme.”

Former telecoms consultant Dr Ana Canhoto, senior lecturer and director of marketing at Oxford Brookes University, added: “It makes sense for the operators to deploy 4G in busy places like Oxford because that is where they have problems with congested bandwidth.

“Ask yourself: are operators going to put a mast in the middle of the countryside to serve just three or four houses, or in a city centre where it is crowded?”

4G is designed to provide users with the ability to carry out tasks such as video calls, streaming high definition films and downloading large files while on the move with a mobile device.

It is being provided by Everything Everywhere, the company that runs the Orange, T-Mobile and EE brands and which started rolling out Britain’s first 4G network last October at a cost of £1.5bn.

Nationally it has already signed up 400,000 users, a figure expected to rise to more than a million by the end of this year when rivals O2 and Vodafone enter the market.

EE bosses say customers will pay a premium of £5 per month more than for 3G and will have to own the latest handset to upgrade to the new service.

Darren Williams, 25, who set up Kidlington-based online marketing firm Muffin Mouth five months ago, said: “This will really help us improve the way we work with our clients and the speed we get back to them.

“We often go up and down to London, so being able to communicate while travelling will be very useful.

“As we do some video work, I can see it will help transfer, upload and download big files and as a newly established business, the timing is perfect for us.”

Howard Jones, senior manager for business network at EE, said: “4G is like having your office with you because the speed is the same you have on a fixed-line broadband connection.

“One of the key things about Oxford is the large number of commuters and people want to be connected the entirety of their day, not just in their office.”

l The county council wants to spend more than £13m to drag Oxfordshire’s broadband internet service into the 21st century.

Taxpayers’ money would be used to subsidise a private company to increase some speeds more than tenfold.

The authority wants to provide at least 90 per cent of households and businesses with a minimum speed of 24 megabits per second (mbps) by 2015, and a minimum of 2mbps in the other 10 per cent.

Oxfordshire’s current average broadband speed is 12mbps.

The council wants to add £10m from its coffers to £3.7m from the Government.