Rural notspots – why there's no phone signal in the countryside and how to fix it
6 min read
It was billed as the solution to poor or absent mobile coverage, but in five years the £1bn Shared Rural Network has built just one tower in a total not-spot. Simon Rockman argues it should be abandoned: there is a better solution available. Illustration by Tracy Worrall
The UK has the worst mobile coverage in Europe. And with the closure of 2G and 3G, and replacement of Chinese equipment with inferior Scandinavian apparatus, the problem is getting worse. A 2024 survey showed only 24 per cent of farms have a reliable mobile signal in all outdoor locations.
How did this happen when the Shared Rural Network was supposed to fix British rural not-spots? The project first mooted in autumn 2019 was launched with fanfare by then-minister for digital at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Matt Warman, in March 2020. In the five years since, it has built only one site in a total not-spot.
The programme had to solve a problem of fixing a hole – not in coverage but in the mobile operators’ business case. The UK has the fifth lowest mobile tariffs in the world, which makes rural infrastructure economics difficult. For the Shared Rural Network, operators committed £532m and government £500m.
It seems that the problem is not with the execution of programme but with its framing and lack of understanding of what it needed to solve.
Mova is the company jointly owned by the four major networks to deliver the Shared Rural Network. Mova’s CEO, Ben Roome, defends the progress strongly: “The programme was set up to deliver 95 per cent coverage, with a massive investment from the mobile operators. Done: 95 per cent delivered 15 months early. Public investment for all four operators to go on the Extended Area Service sites, over 40, running ahead of target. And then in some very, very remote parts of Scotland, the total not-spots element targeting places where they’d never ever had 4G, or any 2G or 3G mobile coverage, and how can that best be delivered at the top of this sort of broad triangle to transform 4G coverage in the country.”
The programme has delivered what it was set up to deliver, Roome argues. But we need to reconcile his contention that the UK now has 95 per cent 4G mobile coverage with people’s real experiences and constituents’ emails.
Paul Carter, from Global Wireless Solutions (GWS), which surveys both coverage and people’s attitudes to their mobile network, says: “Ofcom is always trying to show positive numbers, and not dig deeper; they are not useful because it measures the wrong thing. They should reflect consumers’ experience.”
Ofcom has announced that it is to re-evaluate its methodology for defining an area that is satisfactorily covered, but this feels like too little and too late. For most of the approach, it trusts data from operators. When it does go out to test claims it warns the operators first, uses equipment that measures a signal rather than testing what the network is capable of, and does next to no indoor testing.
Under the parameters for the Shared Rural Network, there are 260 total not-spots – sites where none of the major mobile networks have a signal. All of the priority sites are in Scotland. Given the lax metrics used for defining acceptable coverage, the number of places where people will struggle to use a mobile phone are many times that, but it has never been adequately measured.
It seems that we started with dodgy data and decided that there were not too many total not-spots to be filled in. From there, the programme focused on improving partial not-spots – areas where only one operator already had coverage – and adding more networks to those places.
The result is a programme that is a “success”, but a country where a local authority, business or community that needs a reliable mobile signal does its own surveys and does not trust the data from the mobile operators or regulator.
Even the funding of the Shared Rural Network is unusual. When Ofcom auctions licences, it can attach conditions. It was expected that licences sold in April 2021 would have a coverage obligation. Professor William Webb, former director of technology resources at Ofcom and author of the book Emperor Ofcom’s New Clothes, explains that it looked as though attaching an obligation to the April 2021 licences would reduce their value by too much. Not having a coverage clause and funding, Shared Rural Network looked advantageous. It wasn’t.
Resultant revenue was a disappointing £1.356bn. Webb contends that sweetening the deal with £500m for Shared Rural Network now looks like a mistake. Warman conceeds: “The risk with it was that it was sold as a quick fix and that was always too ambitious”.
Those in the Shared Rural Network programme hint they are in a preparation phase. Mova says although it has only built one site in the first five years, it will build more than 200 in the next two. Or at least deliver on the coverage obligations. That is, obligations to the discredited, previously agreed specification.
Experts from companies that build private networks will tell you the dynamic is very different. Some sites are really easy; others require major engineering. You do all the easy sites really quickly, then pace slows dramatically. There may be some Nimby (Not in my back yard) opposition, but you can usually find people so desperate for connectivity they will happily volunteer their land.
Satellite helps but doesn’t provide the level of service. It provides coverage everywhere that isn’t indoors. Performance is limited by technical problems down to the physics of a mobile base station travelling at 17,000 miles an hour, 340 miles away, and talking to it with a small battery powered device. Wonderful for broadband to a few users in rural areas, but it sacrifices capacity for coverage. Starlink has already stopped accepting new users in the South of England.
Helen Morgan, Liberal Democrat MP for North Shropshire, proposed the Access to Telecommunications Networks Bill 2023-24. At first glance, this isn’t too different to the widely derided plan proposed by then-culture secretary Sir Sajid Javid in 2014.
But there is a transformation caused by the 10-year gap. In 2014 there were only four companies: Vodafone, O2, Three and EE. Since then, we’ve had a revolution in regulation and private networks. More than 40 companies have been granted more than one shared access licence by Ofcom.
These are companies that could invest in, and profit from, filling in the holes left by the big networks. This would be grassroots, rather than trickle-down, network planning. Where there is a need, companies, communities or campuses can put up their own small masts.
The legislation enjoyed cross-party support but ran out of time when the election was called. Bringing it back and requiring all networks, public and private, to roam with one another would be a no-cost way to help fix mobile coverage. The big companies roaming with one another to fix the partial not-spots, and the small ones filling in the holes left by the big boys. And it need not cost the Exchequer a penny.
Simon Rockman has been a technology journalist for over 40 years and founded What Mobile magazine in 1992. He has worked in senior roles at Motorola, Sony Ericsson and the mobile industry trade body GSM Association
