O2 Welcomes Prime Ministers Push to Boost UK Rural Mobile Cover UPDATE
Mobile operator O2 (Telefonica) has welcomed expectations that the current UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, will today announce plans to prioritise mobile coverage, particularly in rural areas. The operator expects that the move will support the industry-led plan for a new Shared Rural Network (SRN) alongside Vodafone, EE and Three UK.
The UK Conservative Party has already published their Manifesto for the 12th December 2019 General Election, which was surprisingly light on any solid commitments for mobile network coverage. Instead it only vaguely promised to “provide greater mobile coverage across the country,” which is notable because their 2017 manifesto clearly pledged to extend geographic 4G coverage to 95% of the UK by 2022.
Alongside the 2017 pledge they also promised that “by the same date, all major roads and main line trains will enjoy full and uninterrupted mobile phone signal, alongside guaranteed WiFi internet service on all such trains.” As it stands the 95% target will not be achieved by all operators come 2022 (although EE alone stands a good chance).
Instead the Government, Ofcom and all four of the primary mobile operators recently signed a new £1bn industry-led deal on mobile coverage (here). The aim of that SRN is to extend geographic coverage – via 4G or better – to 95% of the UK by the end of 2025 (the Government will put £500m into this), which will be delivered via a mix of shared mast infrastructure and new mast builds in rural areas. O2 expects the Prime Minister to put his weight behind that today.
Derek McManus, O2 Chief Operating Officer, said:
“This is fantastic news for mobile customers. O2 has developed and championed the Shared Rural Network over many months, working hand in hand with other operators to get the best experience for people in rural areas.
We believe it offers the best way to deliver major improvements to mobile coverage in rural areas and we are committed to taking it forward in partnership with other operators, and with the support of Government and Ofcom.”
At this point we haven’t been sent a copy of the alleged announcement, although it would be nice if it went a bit further than supporting the SRN’s plan as that’s already been well publicised and agreed.
UPDATE:
In the end Boris did exactly what we expected and merely reiterated the £1bn SRN plan, which had already been announced in the last parliament. We couldn’t see anything “new” in the announcement.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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O2 and Vodafone have good indoor rural 4G coverage. What they lack is capacity. They both (mostly) only use a single 10Mhz Band 20 LTE carrier. So not LTE+ and per cell capacity of ~75Mbps. Hopefully this news will mean that they boost their coverage with and capacity.
Three and EE need indoor rural coverage! They are both completely useless indoors in rural locations and even some city centres for example Canterbury.
Three and EE are the only networks with coverage in my local area. You have to go several miles to detect an O2 signal. Although my Three signal is very good, it is only a 5MHz band, so data rate is limited. That is unlikely to improve as the high bandwidth frequencies don’t travel as far so aren’t used in rural areas.
Depends where you are, we are rural. Indoor signal from Three (both 3G & 4G) and EE (2G, 3G & 4G)patchy, Vodaphone 2G only, and O2 noticeable by its absence.
Also no one seems to want to adress the VoLTE issue, data connectivity is a good thing, but there is still a requirement to make phone calls. The patchy and restrictive nature of VoLTE implementation does not lend itself to that.
It would also help people to see what was going on if the predicted coverage maps of all the operators were more realistic.
I find it highly amusing that I have a phone mast literally 5 minutes down the street (less than 1/2 a mile) yet my 4G coverage is still super patchy and results with mostly full 3G coverage.
Mast sharing isn’t much use where no operator has a reliable signal.
The objectors will still stop roll-out in some areas, no 3G or 4G weak 2G, a small Cotswold town area of about 4000 population, the landowners and objectiors have stopped all masts being built, people say not many people object Now, in 2017. 700 people wrote letters of objection, we really need coverage 3 A roads and tourists to cover, this isn’t the 1970s anymore.
It *is* possible to cover rural areas without 30 metre high towers – within the Chalke Valley in South West Wiltshire we are looking to show how chimney mounted small cells can provide coverage within the villages at a fraction of the cost of expensive masts – and with much faster deployment speed.
The result is a multi operator neutral host solution that provides high quality network slices to all UK MNOs – but without them having to commit major capital investment and with operating costs that allow them to make the rural areas profitable!