A new study conducted by technical consultancy firm FarrPoint, which was commissioned by UK telecoms operator EE (BT), has claimed that deploying 4G mobile (mobile broadband) networks can deliver social and economic benefits, worth between £249,000 and £6.9m, to different types of rural communities over 15 years.
The new study – ‘Rural 4G connectivity: Analysing the community benefits of mobile investment‘ – appears partly intended to help highlight EE’s efforts in building more than 300 new rural mobile masts and upgrading over 1,500 existing sites across the UK in the past 5 years – costing hundreds of millions of pounds.
Much of this has supported EE’s effort under the wider £1bn industry-led Shared Rural Network (SRN) project, which aims to extend geographic 4G coverage (aggregate) to 95% of the UK by the end of 2025 – falling to 84% when only considering the areas where you’ll be able to take 4G from all providers. Not to mention the 50 isolated communities that they and others helped as part of the Scottish 4G Infill (S4GI) project (here).
At the start of this year EE reported that they had already become the first – and so far, only – mobile operator to report having achieved the SRN’s first target for Partial Not-Spot (PNS) areas (i.e. areas that receive coverage from at least one operator, but not all), which required that their 4G service must cover 88% of the UK’s landmass (here). Ofcom has yet to officially confirm this.