The UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is today reportedly gearing up to announce a fresh round of new capital investment in major infrastructure projects (HS2 etc.), which is expected to include a pot of £40 million to support pilots of superfast 5G based wireless (mobile) broadband in rural areas.

At this point readers may recall that the Prime Minister has already committed to invest £5bn in order to have “Gigabit broadband sprouting in every home” by the end of 2025 (here). The funding is to be targeted exclusively at the final 20% of hardest to reach premises (i.e. mostly rural areas and possibly some disadvantaged urban locations).

The adoption of “gigabit” terminology has also enabled the Government to water down their original focus on “full fibre” by including other “gigabit-capable” technologies (here), such as Virgin Media’s predominantly hybrid fibre coax network and ultrafast 5G mobile services have also been mentioned as examples.

On top of that we shouldn’t forget about the Government’s original 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme in 2018, which also included some rural broadband projects. On the other hand that programme confusingly included some fixed wireless deployments that weren’t actually using 5G New Radio technology at all, despite adopting the terminology and some similar radio bands.

The big challenge with using 5G in any rural setting is the fact that in a normal mobile environment the operators’ tend to focus on lower frequency mobile bands (e.g. 700MHz, 800MHZ, 900MHz, 1800MHz and 2100MHz) in order to achieve the widest possible coverage at the lowest cost (rural communities are small and sparse over a wide geographic area).

Sadly such bands don’t provide operators with much frequency spectrum in order to deliver their data, which makes achieving Gigabit speeds rather difficult. By comparison the higher frequency 5G bands, such as from 3.4GHz and upwards, provide a lot more spectrum to deliver data but their signals don’t travel as far and will struggle to penetrate indoors in any meaningful way.

Due to the above we suspect that the new pilots will most likely focus on targeted Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) style solutions, which – much like under the previous programme – may or may not actually involve real 5G New Radio tech. In these setups it’s not uncommon to mix targetted “Full Fibre” or Microwave capacity links with local Line-of-Sight (LoS) wireless links that connect directly to receiving antennas installed outside of a home.

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