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The Government has announced that the £1bn industry-led Shared Rural Network (SRN) project, which aimed to extend geographic 4G mobile (mobile broadband) coverage to 95% of the UK (aggregate) by the end of 2025 (5G also benefits from the new infrastructure), has “achieved its overarching target a year ahead of schedule“. But there’s more work left to do.
The SRN – supported by £501m of public funding and £532m of private investment from operators – involves both the reciprocal sharing of existing masts in certain areas and the demand-led building and sharing of new masts in others between the operators. But the programme actually consists of two main targets, which often gets overlooked.
The first target, which was achieved around the end of last summer (i.e. extending 4G coverage 88% of the UK’s landmass), involved the delivery of industry funded coverage improvements in Partial Not-Spot (PNS) areas (i.e. areas that receive coverage from at least one operator, but not all).
The second target involved tackling Total Not-Spot (TNS) areas by early 2027. Ofcom’s licence obligations commit each individual operator to increase its 4G coverage to 90% of the UK’s landmass by January 2027 – with these individual obligations supporting the overall target of 95% by December 2025.
As part of all this the SRN was intended to provide guaranteed coverage to an additional 280,000 UK premises, 16,000km of roads and boost ‘in car’ coverage on around 45,000 km of road, as well as better indoor coverage for around 1.2 million premises.
Hitting the target early
The good news this morning is that the SRN programme has “achieved its overarching target a year ahead of schedule“, with over 95% of the UK now within range of a 4G mobile signal as a result of all MNOs (EE, Vodafone / Three UK and O2) delivering new infrastructure. The programme has also met its road and premises targets, which were due in January 2027, and delivered more than 50 government-funded mast upgrades as part of the SRN’s Extended Area Service (EAS) project.
The EAS phase of the work focuses on the part of the SRN that sees the government providing a total of £184m from their pot to the Home Office and mobile operators, which is helping to upgrade EAS masts being built as part of the 4G Emergency Services Network (ESN) – these masts previously only connected EE customers and anyone making 999 calls (i.e. all mobile operators can now use these sites).
4G Mobile Coverage (SRN) Progress – 29th June 2025
The programme today said that it is now focusing on addressing the connectivity challenges in more “hard-to-reach areas” of Great Britain that are TNS areas. “We have spent time engaging with local communities and interest groups, especially in Scotland, to understand how best to maximise the benefits of future mobile upgrades,” said the announcement.
As a result of these conversations, the Government and the operators have agreed to “prioritise new mobile infrastructure for areas where it will have the biggest positive impact, primarily where people live, work, or travel, including walking and hiking routes“. This includes parts of the West Highland Way and Munros Ben Lawers and Ben Vorlich where there is no 4G signal at all, yet walkers and tourists regularly need it – especially in emergency situations.
Under the revised plans, while “fewer new masts are planned” across rural Scotland, those that are built will provide new mobile coverage to areas such as Glen Coe, the Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park, Wester Ross, and several islands including the Isle of Mull, South Uist and Skye. Readers can see an updated MAP of Planned Mast Builds in Scotland on the SRN website.
However, the somewhat low-key announcement (there are no quotes from anybody included and it flew in as a routine update), makes no mention of how much this change impacts the project’s public funding. Mobile network operators, which feel they’ve been doing their part, were previously reported to have been concerned that the government may have been looking to cut costs and thus not reinvest any savings back into mobile connectivity (here).
On the other hand, mobile operators had previously expressed a desire for any saved SRN based public funding to be reinvested to help improve coverage across the UK’s railways, which is very relevant because the government recently unveiled Project Reach – a public-private partnership that will deploy “ultra fast fibre optic cable” across 1,000km of major rail lines to help “eliminate mobile signal blackspots” in tunnels on “key rail routes” up and down the country.
In addition, the Government’s recently published its 10 Year Industrial Strategy, which among other things pledged £41m to help introduce Low Earth Orbit (LEO) broadband satellite connectivity “on all mainline trains” in order to “significantly improve both the availability and internet data connection speeds for Wi-Fi connected passengers.” The Project Reach announcement appears intended to complement that effort, so perhaps the mobile operators got what they wanted.
Finally, in May 2025, the government stated that a further 50 state-aid funded mast sites in England, Wales and Scotland were being targeted for upgrades by March 2026 (here).