Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what estimate her Department has made of the number of additional telecoms infrastructure sites that will be required to deliver high-quality standalone 5G coverage to all populated areas by 2030.

Government’s ambition is for all populated areas to have access to higher quality standalone 5G by 2030. It is for the mobile network operators to determine how best to deploy the required infrastructure to achieve this.

The need for additional sites will be determined based on a number of variables, including their existing site portfolios and areas of current network congestion. It is likely that additional sites will be required to deliver our ambition, but the mobile network operators are assessing this as part of their commercial delivery plans.