Asked by: Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Ashton of Hyde on 6 June (HL8104), what systems are in place across existing mobile networks to ensure that they continue to operate during a prolonged power outage.
Answered by Lord Ashton of Hyde
DCMS works closely with industry to ensure that telecoms, as one of the UK’s critical sectors, is both secure and resilient. This includes work to ensure that security and resilience plans are updated and developed as technology changes and to reflect key risks and contingency planning. The industry-led Electronic Communications Resilience & Response Group, which DCMS supports and facilitates, is a cross-government and industry partnership that leads on resilience activity in the telecoms sector as a whole and considers a range of security and resilience issues including power loss.
Asked by: Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they intend to take to provide sufficient back-up power generation for the 5G mobile system to ensure that the emergency communication system can operate during an prolonged power outage.
Answered by Lord Ashton of Hyde
As 5G technology is still at innovation stage and has not been commercially deployed yet, there are currently no national 5G networks in the UK. Once this technology is deployed, it will be built out across existing networks and complimentary to them. Widespread loss of electricity is one of the highest risks in the National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies published by government. As a result, DCMS together with Ofcom and industry take power resilience matters and telecommunications very seriously.