Plans for a digital switchover which will render traditional landlines redundant will leave rural communities at risk, according to campaigners.

Despite a delay, BT is planning to replace analogue phone lines with broadband based ones by 2025.

In Shropshire, where signal can be “patchy”, campaigners say older and more vulnerable people who rely on their landlines will be “cut off”.

BT said the move to digital was a necessary upgrade and more efficient.

Earlier this year the telecoms giant announced a delay to the rollout, recognising that “we have more work to do on getting better back-up solutions in place for when things disrupt the service”.

Councillor Heather Kidd, from Shropshire Council, is calling for the rollout to be held until there is a “solid plan” that can work for everyone.

She said it could leave people unable to call for help in the event of an emergency.

“Nobody has really come up with a way of making sure there’s good mobile phone signal, but that still doesn’t address those people that are not digitally enabled, who really can’t use smartphones that the world thinks we can all depend on,” she said.

“The landline for those people is an absolute.”

The UK’s Royal Mail wants to set up as many as 50 drone routes over the next three years to make deliveries to remote communities. The plan, which requires approval from the Civil Aviation Authority, would see the service secure up to 200 of the autonomous devices from logistics drone company Windracers.

The Royal Mail said the first communities to benefit would be the Isles of Scilly (off the coast of Cornwall in south-west England) and the Scottish islands of Shetland, Orkney and the Hebrides.

Test flights started last year. In the most recent one, held in April, the service was able to use a UAV to deliver mail to Unst, Britain’s most northerly inhabited island, from Tingwall Airport on Shetland’s largest island. That’s a 50-mile flight each way.

The twin-engine drone used in the tests can carry a payload of up to 100 kg of mail and take two return flights each day. The Royal Mail said the device has a wingspan of 10 meters and can withstand difficult weather conditions with the help of its autopilot system. After the drone arrives at its destination, a postal worker will retrieve the mail and parcels and deliver them.

The Royal Mail claimed the drones would help it reduce carbon emissions and provide a more reliable delivery service to islands. It eventually hopes to have a fleet of more than 500 drones that will operate across the UK.

The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has said that the lack of rural connectivity is holding UK farming back.

This is a conclusion it has drawn based on the findings from its recently published Digital Technology Survey, which heard from 846 NFU farmer members between December 9, 2021 and March 13, 2022.

It found that only 38% of respondents said their broadband speed is sufficient for the needs of their business – which is 2% worse than the NFU’s corresponding 2021 survey.

“This survey makes for very disappointing reading,” said NFU vice president David Exwood.

“It shows that very little progress has been made over the past year to increase levels of broadband and mobile access in rural areas despite government promises to level up the country.

“This lack of digital connectivity puts a huge drain on time and efficiency as we’re effectively working with one arm tied behind our backs.”

The survey also found that 83% of respondents are unable to get reliable mobile signal in all outdoor locations on their farm and only 44% said their phone signal is sufficient for the needs of their business.

The gap between urban and rural broadband performance is narrowing, according to a new study by Ofcom, but campaigners say this is ‘just the start’ after years of poor connectivity.

Data shows that the 9% difference between the proportion of urban (74%) and rural (65%) home broadband lines, with an average evening peak-time speed of 30 Mbit/s or higher in March 2021, was lower than the 12% difference recorded in November 2019.

This comes as the availability and take-up of superfast, ultrafast and gigabit services have increased in rural areas of the country.

However, the difference between the March 2021 proportions of urban (5%) and rural (17%) broadband lines, with an average 8-10pm peak-time actual download speed of less than 10 Mbit/s (12pp), was unchanged since November 2019, when the respective urban and rural figures were 10% and 22%.

Although the difference between average urban and rural peak-time download speeds is declining, average peak-time download speeds in urban areas (55.1 Mbit/s) were still a third higher than those in rural areas (41.3 Mbit/s) in March 2021.

While the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) welcomed the figures as a step in the right direction, it warned the rural economy was still being held back by poor broadband.

The government has launched a £4m fund to back projects trialling running fibre optic broadband cables through water pipes to help connect hard-to-reach homes without digging up roads.

The money will also be used to test out monitors in pipes that can help water companies identify and repair leaks more quickly. About a fifth of water put into public supply every day is lost via leaks and it is hoped that sensors could help deliver water companies’ commitment to reduce water loss by half.

Infrastruture works, in particular installing new ducts and poles, can make up as much as four-fifths of the costs to industry of building new gigabit-capable broadband networks, the government said.

The project is designed to help cut those costs, and is part of a plan to improve broadband and mobile signals in rural areas.

The digital infrastructure minister, Matt Warman, said: “The cost of digging up roads and land is the biggest obstacle telecoms companies face when connecting hard-to-reach areas to better broadband, but beneath our feet there is a vast network of pipes reaching virtually every building in the country.

“So we are calling on Britain’s brilliant innovators to help us use this infrastructure to serve a dual purpose of serving up not just fresh and clean water but also lightning-fast digital connectivity.”

In a move that it says moves it a step closer to delivering better mobile coverage in rural areas, the UK government has published its transparency notice for its Shared Rural Network (SRN) programme, and will now proceed with a £500m investment designed to provide all corners of the UK with better mobile connectivity.

The £1.3bn SRN programme was first proposed in October 2019, aiming to wipe so-called “not spots” from the map, providing what the government claims will be “high-quality” 4G coverage to 95% of the UK by 2025. This followed years of complaints by mobile consumers and businesses that the major political parties had consistently failed rural businesses by lacking a credible solution to improve mobile 4G and 5G coverage.

In practice, the SRN will be made possible through a partnership between the UK’s four major telecoms operators – EE, O2, Three and Vodafone – which will invest in a network of new and existing phone masts they will all share, overseen by a jointly owned company called Digital Mobile Spectrum Limited

People in rural areas of the UK have revealed what it is like to use Elon Musk’s satellite broadband service after struggling with poor connectivity.

Musk’s SpaceX company has already launched more than 1,000 satellites into Earth’s orbit as part of its Starlink programme, which aims to beam high-speed internet to those left behind by traditional cable-based providers.

But this is just the beginning of the project – Musk reportedly wants to have tens of thousands of his satellites in space eventually, enabling a seamless connection for all users.

Early testing of Starlink was recently opened up to UK residents desperate for a better connection in certain parts of the country, while other areas have been told to expect coverage arriving sometime in mid to late 2021.

Aaron Wilkes, who lives in Bredgar, Kent, told the PA news agency his household’s fixed line should achieve about 20 megabits per second (Mbps) – significantly less than the 71.8Mbps national average reported by Ofcom for May 2020 – but he said the service often lagged between 0.5 and 1Mbps. Such speeds made it almost impossible to stream Netflix or download large video games.

“The ability to be able to download content so quickly compared to our standard BT line is amazing,” said Wilkes.

However, it does not come cheap, at £439 for the hardware and a monthly cost of £89. Plus, there are planned outages due to the limited number of satellites and the fact that Starlink is still in early testing. But those who have suffered with sluggish internet say it is a price worth paying.

Thousands of farmers could be left with slow broadband for years to come because of a “litany of failures” by government to roll out ultrafast technology to rural areas, according to a group of MPs.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said people living in rural areas “risk being left even further behind” if the government fails to raise its game on rural connectivity.

The warning comes after the UK government revised down its target to deliver nationwide “gigabit” broadband connectivity by 2025 from 100% to 85% of the country.

And its National Infrastructure Strategy does not state a target date for when it expects every home to have access to a 1Gbps-capable connection.

Between 2021 and 2025, the government has committed £1.2bn of the programme’s original £5bn budget, pledged in its 2019 election manifesto, to “subsidise the rollout of gigabit-capable broadband… to the hardest-to-reach areas”. There are no details on how and when the remaining £3.8bn will be allocated.

More than 95% of UK premises now have access to fast broadband speeds of at least 30Mbps, according to Ofcom. But about 1.6m premises, mainly in rural areas, can’t yet access fast speeds. Every home in the UK now has a legal right to internet speeds of a minimum of 10Mbps.

Internet and network providers have asked the government to clarify why its promised £5bn investment in rural broadband has been reduced to £1.2bn.

Industry bodies said they wanted clarity on how and when the remaining £3.8bn would be allocated.

The change was announced in Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s spending review.

The government has also watered down its election pledge to reach every home in the country to the lower target of 85%.

Providing all homes and businesses in the UK with gigabit broadband speeds by 2025 was one of Boris Johnson’s most ambitious election pledges.

It came with the promise of £5bn to get the job done – but in the spending review it was announced that only £1.2bn of that would be made available over the next four years.

Wisbech is a pretty market town in Cambridgeshire but it’s an area divided by access to fast broadband.

Paul Brett moved to the area in 2003, seeking a slightly more laid-back way of life. But as a software engineer, he also needed fast broadband.

And despite being in a location that is not exactly rural – he can see the town from his house – he has struggled, initially on a 0.5Mbps (megabits per second) connection when he moved in, rising to 5Mbps now – still in the bottom few in the country for broadband speed.

A few years ago he was hopeful he could make the leap into the 21st century when a technology called Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) finally became available to the town.

He was disappointed to find it didn’t help.

“My speed halved – rather than being an upgrade it got worse, so I immediately cancelled that and got my money back,” he says.

That’s because FTTC, as the name suggests, runs only to the nearest green street cabinet. For the last part of the journey, broadband has to travel along old copper wire – which means that the further away you live, the worse the speed gets.

Not to be defeated, Mr Brett clubbed together with some of his neighbours to persuade BT to run 1Gbps (gigabit per second) fibre broadband to their street.

But when the quote came back from Openreach, the spin-off from BT that is responsible for the vast majority of the UK’s broadband infrastructure, he was shocked.

“I was quoted £101,855.00 – which seemed high.”

There was no breakdown of the cost but Openreach had helpfully done some of the maths – for 17 premises the cost per home or business would be £5,991.47, with the possibility of vouchers taking an estimated £20,000 off the overall estimate.