First Mobile Mast LIVE in Scotland’s Delayed 4G Infill Scheme UPDATE

Good news, the Scottish Government‘s £25m 4G Infill Programme, which originally aimed to improve rural mobile coverage (mostly notspots across the Highlands and Islands) by building a network of 45 new masts for UK mobile operators to use (here), has finally built its first mast. Bad news, they’re well behind schedule.

Under the original plan construction – delivered by WHP Telecoms – was supposed to start toward the end of 2018 and then run for 4 years until the end of 2022, although today’s announcement states that “up to” 24 masts are now scheduled to be rolled out over the next two years (roughly half of what they originally expected to deliver by 2022). The remaining mast sites are merely said to still be “under consideration.”

In the meantime we have our first live mast (i.e. built and with active support from UK mobile operators) and able to serve residents around New Luce in Wigtownshire. At present only Vodafone are offering a 2G, 3G and 4G (mobile broadband) signal from this site, although EE (BT) are expected to follow “later this year” (there’s no word on Three UK or O2). EE will apparently also “provide service from a majority of sites in the programme.”

Paul Wheelhouse, Scottish Connectivity Minister, said:

“While telecommunications is a responsibility of UK ministers, improving mobile coverage is vital to achieving the Scottish Government’s ambition to make sure everyone in Scotland has access to high-speed, reliable coverage.

People in New Luce are the first to benefit but we hope that, like Wigtownshire, many more remote and rural parts of Scotland and Scotland’s islands will soon enjoy improved, cost-effective connectivity as a result of the Scottish Government’s work with industry and other partners, and our investment in the £25 million S4GI Programme.”

As for the reasons why the Scottish Government seems to be so far behind on their original plan, last year Paul Wheelhouse said (here), “The biggest challenge is trying to attract interest from mobile operators to actually utilise the masts.” Sadly he didn’t elaborate and the trade body Mobile UK was similarly coy when we questioned them.

However part of the issue could be related to a clash with the wider and similarly focused £1bn Shared Rural Network (SRN) plan, which has been in gestation for the past year or so. Mobile operators will have wanted to figure that out first before knowing how to fit everything together in their forward plans.

On the other hand the 4G Infill scheme also harbours shades of the UK Government’s somewhat failed £150m Mobile Infrastructure Project, which set out with grand ambitions to improve mobile coverage in rural notspots but only ended up building 75 of the promised 575 masts (here).

The MIP became bogged down by a mix of problems, from delays in getting planning permission (some communities were unhappy and protested), to challenges with securing wayleave agreements via many different landowners and the difficulty of getting both a good power supply and backhaul capacity to such remote locations. Building the mast is one thing, but making it operational is another ball game entirely.

UPDATE 21st Feb 2020

As usual there’s a little more to this news under the hood. One of our readers has pointed out that there’s been another big change because 26 out of the originally identified 45 sites have now been completely dropped from the programme, due to lack of interest from mobile operators (e.g. the sites at Bruray in Skerries).

However, it’s not all bad news because 16 new site “candidates” have been added back in for future consideration. You can see an updated map of this change here: https://www.gov.scot/publications/scottish-4g-infill-programme-map/ .