Broadband: Rural Areas

(asked on 16th March 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what recent steps her Department has taken to help improve broadband and mobile phone coverage in rural areas.


Answered by
Julia Lopez Portrait
Julia Lopez
Minister of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
This question was answered on 22nd March 2022

We are investing £5 billion through Project Gigabit to provide reliable, lightning-fast, future-proofed connectivity in areas not covered by commercial delivery. Project Gigabit is central to how we level up, future-proofing connectivity for decades to come and ensuring no-one is left behind.

We have already upgraded 600,000 premises to gigabit-capable broadband, and in three years national gigabit coverage has rocketed from six per cent to 66 per cent.

Procurements under Project Gigabit are now under way in a number of regions across the country to extend this further. Up to 2.5million hard-to-reach premises have been announced as within scope for gigabit procurements and up to £210 million in vouchers is available to help communities that are not in line for commercial or publicly-funded projects right now.

The Government also recognises the frustration arising from the impact poor mobile coverage has on communities, particularly in rural areas. That is why we agreed a deal with the mobile network operators to deliver the Shared Rural Network programme. This agreement will see the government and industry jointly invest over £1 billion to increase 4G mobile coverage to 95% UK geography by the end of the programme. It will improve coverage for an extra 280,000 premises and 16,000km of roads tackling not-spots and reduce the divide in connectivity between urban and rural areas.

The four mobile network operators have already commenced work on the first element of the programme, which is funded by industry, and work is already under way and on track to eliminate the majority of partial not-spots - areas of the UK where there is currently coverage from at least one, but not all operators - by mid-2024.

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