Mobile Networks: Resilience

Lord Foster of Bath Excerpts

Tuesday 11th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I assure my noble friend that my department, which is responsible for telecoms, will continue to work with the Electronic Communications Resilience and Response Group. By coincidence, there is a meeting of that group next week, from which we will find out exactly what happened with the O2 outage and the emergency response, which worked well. I can assure my noble friend that we will continue with that, whatever happens with Brexit.

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, any measures that improve the resilience of mobile connectivity for those that already have it will be welcome but sadly, many people, particularly in rural areas, have no or poor mobile connectivity. What steps are the Government taking to help those people? In particular, do they intend to place on the winner of the auction of the 700 megahertz spectrum a rural coverage obligation or, better still, a RuralFirst obligation?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

As the noble Lord knows, the Government have made huge progress in extending the availability of both broadband and mobile connectivity. The Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review showed the way to increasing the amount of fibre optic cable across the country, which is currently behind the European average, and we now plan to do that. One of its features is the “outside in” policy, which will enable rural areas to have priority in the rolling out of fibre-optic cable.