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The National Farmers Union (NFU) has published the results from their annual digital access survey of 661 members (conducted between February and March 2025), which found that just 33% of farmers had access to “fibre broadband” speeds and nearly one out of ten respondents have no 4G or 5G mobile access.
Farmers naturally tend to work in some of the United Kingdom’s most sparse and remote rural areas, which frequently end up being last on the list to be upgraded (if they’re improved at all), due to the economic challenges of building expensive networks to cater for so few users over a wide area. As such, the fact that they suffer a greater proportion of connectivity problems will come as no surprise, but the digital divide has shrunk a lot in recent years.
The new survey further reveals that 21% of farmers have fixed broadband speeds under 10Mbps – compared to the national average of less than 1%, while only 22% report getting reliable mobile signal across their entire farm. Yet nearly all respondents say mobile signal (98%) and broadband (91%) are important for their business.
The coverage of both mobile and fixed broadband services does of course continue to improve with every passing year, but this won’t mean much to those who are waiting for better connectivity to arrive. Admittedly in some areas it’s also possible that a better service could already exist, but that the locals may not have realised yet (awareness is still a common issue), although the NFU’s survey doesn’t examine this.
Additional Survey Highlights
➤ 54% of respondents believe that the mobile signal they receive is sufficient for the needs of their business
➤ 63% of respondents believe their broadband speed is sufficient for the needs of their business
➤ 61% of respondents access the internet through their mobile
➤ 33% of respondents have “fibre” (the survey doesn’t define if this includes both FTTC and FTTP)
➤ 7% of respondents have a download speed of 2Mbps or less
➤ 12% of respondents are reached by “ultrafast” broadband (this is not defined in the news summary)
The Government would no doubt argue that they’re continuing to improve mobile and broadband connectivity, such as via the £1bn industry-led Shared Rural Network (SRN) project to improve 4G connectivity that recently delivered on its first target ahead of schedule and will continue to expand its reach until January 2027 (here).
The goal of the SRN is to expand 4G coverage to 90% in England, 74% in Scotland, 80% in Wales and 85% in N.Ireland when looking at coverage from all MNOs combined (i.e. you can get a signal from all of EE, O2, Vodafone / Three UK in these areas). This might not seem all that good, but true universal coverage would cost billions more and mostly end up reaching empty space (doesn’t pass the value for money test).
On top of that there’s the £5bn Project Gigabit scheme, which aims to help extend gigabit-capable fixed broadband (1Gbps+ downloads) coverage “nationwide” (c.99% of premises) by 2032, although this target was recently put back by two years after originally aiming to deliver it by 2030 (here). Finally, there’s the goal of delivering 5G Standalone (SA) coverage “for all populated areas” by 2030 (here), while VodafoneThree aim to reach 99.95% UK population coverage of their 5G SA network by 2034 (here).
Rachel Hallos, NFU Vice-president, said:
“We have been consistently told by government that food security is national security, but to deliver on that farmers need the right tools.
Right now, poor connectivity is holding back the full potential of British farming. We welcome the government’s investment announced in the Spending Review, but these delays risk leaving rural farms disconnected for longer.
This isn’t about asking for special treatment. It’s about fairness. Rural businesses, families and communities deserve the same opportunities as everyone else – and that starts with being properly connected.”
The NFU is now calling on the government to “deliver mobile and broadband connectivity to rural areas“, not least by asking for Shared Rural Network (SRN) to remain a priority. Farmers also want all broadband delivery support schemes to be applicable to all types of broadband – “not just fibre” (alternatives like fixed wireless or mobile broadband are specifically mentioned), as well as better and more widely available rural and agricultural specific digital skills training, and for “clear times to be laid out” to ensure that delivery targets are being met.
The previous government was in the process of examining support options for very remote premises and had also been preparing to review the 10Mbps broadband Universal Service Obligation (here), which may bring some changes in the future (the Labour Party previously called for a 30Mbps USO). But the change of government may have delayed that effort and the recent 10-Year Industrial Strategy didn’t provide much in the way of new information.
Failing that, farmers can today also consider exploring the option of a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) based satellite broadband service – Starlink from SpaceX is pretty good, if you can afford it and look past the ‘Musk’ factor. But improving connectivity in rural areas isn’t merely the responsibility of governments and network operators to resolve.
For example, rural landowners sometimes battle and demand higher rents for the installation of new mobile masts – causing delays and higher costs, while local community members frequently object to such deployments due to their visual impact on the nearby landscape.
Suffice to say, it’s easy to demand improvements, but you also have to be open to the fact that a lot of the needed infrastructure is not going to be invisible. Sometimes it’s possible to hide and conceal such things, but sometimes it’s not, and trying to do so might make the whole deployment economically unviable. The NFU doesn’t touch on this though.