Mobile Networks: Resilience Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Foster of Bath
Main Page: Lord Foster of Bath (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Foster of Bath's debates with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
(5 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberI 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.
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?
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.