A coalition of 46 signatories (mostly in Scotland), including various outdoor conservation organisations, community councils / trusts and landowners, have again called on the UK government to avoid “needless damage to large areas of some of the wildest places” by reconsidering the rural expansion of 4G (broadband) mobile masts under the £1bn Shared Rural Network project.
The industry-led SRN project with EE (BT), Vodafone, Three UK and O2 (Virgin Media) – supported by £501m of public funding and £532m 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 (MNO). The target is to extend geographic 4G coverage (aggregate) to 95% of the UK by the end of 2025, which falls to 84% when only considering the areas where you’ll be able to take 4G from all providers. Future 5G upgrades will also benefit from the new infrastructure.
The SRN includes two key targets. The first involves 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), which needed to be achieved by June 2024 – at this point 4G (mobile broadband) must cover 88% of the UK’s landmass (only Three UK appear to have missed this – here).
The second target, which is the one that the aforementioned coalition has concerns about, involves tackling Total Not-Spot (TNS) areas by early 2027. Just to be clear, Ofcom’s licence obligations commit each individual operator to increase its 4G coverage to 88% of the UK’s landmass by June 2024 – rising to 90% by January 2027 – with these individual obligations supporting the overall target of 95% by December 2025.
The SRN largely only exists because many people and MPs were complaining about the UK’s patchy mobile coverage, which has long been noted to be particularly weak in rural areas. But not everybody is happy with the idea of erecting masts around the countryside, and that’s particularly true in Scotland, where 260 sites have been classified as TNS.
The coalition, which includes various organisations such as RSPB Scotland, the John Muir Trust, Mountaineering Scotland, Scottish Land & Estates, the National Trust for Scotland, Ramblers Scotland, and Woodland Trust Scotland, among others, have now written to the UK’s new Digital Infrastructure Minister, Sir Chris Bryant, and called on him to consider the environmental impact of the SRN.
The focus of all this seems to be on TNS areas, where the coalition claims that sites are “often selected mainly to provide landmass coverage and meet the geographical targets of the programme, rather than prioritising coverage for communities or transport routes.” This is worth investigating, but it should also be noted that mobile operators are commercial companies and will generally still seek to gain some return on their investment (i.e. improving rural coverage is not the most lucrative of exercises, but it usually does still bring something back).
Sarah-Jane Laing, CEO of Scottish Land and Estates, said:
“The SRN programme has been vital in improving mobile connectivity for many communities and businesses across Scotland, but it risks undermining that achievement by placing expensive masts in locations where there is no demand for them and where the infrastructure will be a blot on the landscape – potentially irreparably damaging these special, often untouched, places.
We are urging the Government to undertake a review of the TNS programme and take a pragmatic approach rather than simply pushing forward in order to achieve ill-devised targets.”
In keeping with all this, Mountaineering Scotland have produced an interactive map and list of active SRN planning proposals (here). But if any of this sounds familiar, then that’s because the same coalition raised similar concerns toward the end of last year (here). The new approach is thus perhaps an attempt to test the waters and see whether the new Labour-led government is more receptive to their concerns.
However, the new government has already committed to making a “renewed push to fulfil the ambition of full gigabit and national 5G coverage by 2030” (i.e. broadly supporting the previous government’s targets), and have similarly moved to cut more red tape via reform of the planning system. Suffice to say that we do not expect too many changes from the Government on this side of things.