Ofcom Finds Three UK Misses First Rural 4G Mobile Coverage Target

The UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has today published its first report on the progress of the £1bn industry-led Shared Rural Network project (i.e. extending 4G mobile (broadband) to cover 95% of the UK by the end of 2025), which confirms that Three UK is the only mobile operator to miss the first coverage target for Partial Not-Spot (PNS) areas.

Just to recap. The SRN – 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.

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 (EE, Vodafone and O2 all claim to have achieved this, but Three UK was known to be lagging behind).

The second target involves 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 the end of June 2024 – rising to 90% by 31st January 2027 – with these individual obligations supporting the overall target of 95% by December 2025.

Ofcom has spent the summer reviewing the progress of the SRN scheme, which follows some earlier criticism of the programme by both the National Audit Office (here) and Public Accounts Committee (here). But at least some of the concerns over progress have recently been tackled (here and here) and the regulator’s progress report confirms that EE (BT), Vodafone and O2 (Virgin Media) did achieve the first PNS target. But it’s not mixed news for Three UK.

Summary of Ofcom’s key findings:

On the basis of our analysis, we found that:

• BT EE, VMO2 and Vodafone have met the 88% UK-wide threshold and their individual thresholds for each UK nation.

• Three had not met the 88% UK-wide threshold and its individual threshold in Scotland (72%) at the point these obligations fell due.

We also found that the coverage increases delivered because of the SRN programme have significantly reduced the scale of “partial not spots”, and consequently increased the areas where all MNOs provide coverage. These common or “full” coverage areas have increased from 66% of the UK landmass at the start of 2020 to over 78% of the UK landmass today.

The good news is that Three UK has since informed Ofcom “that it believes it had met their obligations by 22nd August 2024“, although the regulator said that it would take them a few more months of analysis before they could verify that claim (i.e. a further update on this will follow latter).

However, Ofcom does acknowledge that “there remain locations where good quality coverage is still not present“, and that their methodology for analysing coverage won’t always be able to reflect real-world experiences on the ground (i.e. accurately mapping variable mobile signals remains a notoriously difficult thing to do).

“We will continue to monitor MNOs compliance with these commitments in the coming years. Ofcom is also continuing work to explore whether other forms of information about mobile coverage can be used to improve the accuracy of information made available to consumers,” said Ofcom’s report. The regulator is not currently expected to take any punitive action against Three UK for falling slightly behind the first target.