The site is in the Scottish isles and part of the slow-moving, government-backed Shared Rural Network
Three UK has begun building the first joint site in the UK’s 4G Shared Rural Network (SRN) on the Scottish Isle of Mull.
It is one of 66 planned SRN sites across Argyll and Bute that are designed to increase geographic coverage from 56% of Scotland’s landmass to at least 72% by 2024. This is the largest SRN commitment among the home nations.
The new site should go live early in 2023 and will also provide connectivity to Vodafone and O2 customers as part of an agreement that will see each mobile operator build 74 shared sites.
Three will start construction on two more sites in Argyll and Bute, and Aberdeenshire before Christmas.
Action elsewhere
As part of the wider SRN programme, work is well underway across all home nations, with 51 new sites already live.
Despite Three’s upbeat view of progress, in fact it has been glacial. Ofcom’s Connected Nations report published in May this year indicated that coverage had reached 92%, up by just 1% since January 2021. And indeed, as Telco Titans pointed out, that 92% threshold had been reached by May 2021 – so not even a whole percentage point increase over a year that can be attributed to the SRN.
The autumn edition of the same report, published in early October, noted, “Coverage of 4G mobile networks across the UK has not seen significant changes over the last reporting periods”.
A bit of background
Here’s the SRN sketch, in case you’d forgotten what’s supposed to happen…
The Shared Rural Network is a £1 billion programme to improve rural mobile coverage and was agreed by the mobile network operators, government and Ofcom in March 2020 after considerable wrangling: as one analyst pointed out, BT was concerned its competitors would benefit from its greater network coverage and sunk investment.
The programme is funded by the mobile industry and government and invests in new and existing phone masts to increase all operators’ 4G coverage to at least 90% of UK landmass and their aggregate coverage to 95% by 2026.
It will provide guaranteed coverage to an additional 280,000 premises and 16,000km of roads and boost in-car coverage on around 45,000 km of road and improve indoor coverage in around 1.2m business premises and homes.