Broadband Savvy has released the results of a study into the cost and performance of UK broadband in different geographies, conducted by OnePoll. The study compared broadband speeds paid for and received by consumers across the country, and how much people pay for their home broadband.

The survey revealed that rural households pay 76 per cent more for broadband compared to those in urban locations. In towns and city fringes, broadband costs 22 per cent more on average than it does in urban centres.

Rural households are also more likely to receive slower broadband speeds than what they pay for, compared to those in cities. People living in urban areas receive speeds 3 per cent slower than what they pay for on average, while the figure is 19 per cent in suburban neighbourhoods. Those living in the rural UK receive speeds 28 per cent slower on average than the advertised typical download speed.

“We expected rural broadband to cost more than in other parts of the UK, but not by this much,” said Tom Paton, founder of Broadband Savvy. “It’s not just that the quoted prices are higher in rural areas – we also found that ISPs often deliver slower speeds than what they promise consumers who live in the countryside. This reflects decades of infrastructure failings – the ancient copper cabling that many rural households rely on simply isn’t capable of providing a quality, consistent broadband connection.”

By region, the North East, Northern Ireland, and Scotland have the UK’s most expensive broadband, paying £0.58, £0.51, and £0.46 respectively per megabit of download speed received. By contrast, London, Wales, and the South East have the cheapest broadband, at £0.23, £0.28, and £0.35 respectively.

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.

UK mobile operators are close to agreeing a deal to share mobile masts in rural areas, with O2, Vodafone and 3 UK set to build and share their own masts, leaving BT to pursue its own plans, reports The Telegraph.

According to unnamed sources, the plans could be announced as early as the week of 24 February, although this timetable could be delayed as the contracts are finalised. The move by BT rivals to go it alone comes after the company wanted to charge rent for access to its masts, rather than build new shared sites. The proposed fees are understood to be more than 3-times standard industry rates, with BT insisting that the charges are ‘fair and reasonable’ when taking into account its investment.

Once source told The Telegraph that it made no sense for the other mobile operators to spend more sharing the BT network than it would cost to build and share their own masts. The operators declined to comment on the report. 

Rural homes across the UK could be set to enjoy a connectivity boost thanks to a new partnership between Linksys and Gigaclear.

The rural broadband provider has announced a tie-up with the router firmts to offer an in-home Smart WiFi “mesh home” system that should allow customers to enjoy faster speeds and more reliable connectivity.

Gigaclear says that the new platform will overcome many of the unique challenges that appear when connecting rural properties, including metal, mirrors, concrete, impenetrable stone walls, large rooms and unusual property layouts.

Its network essentially casts a ‘WiFi bubble’ over an area, giving users the chance to get online and work from home, stream TV or movies, or just catch up with friends, family and co-workers. 

The network, based on Linksys Velop routers, can be extended throughout the home by adding a series of interconnected nodes to expand WiFi coverage, as opposed to traditional boosters, which simply relay the signal.

5G networks are starting to pop up in UK cities – but for many rural areas even getting a basic mobile signal remains a challenge.

This was certainly the case in the Orkney Islands, an archipelago of 70 islands off the north coast of Scotland.

Its population of 22,000 is spread across 20 of these islands and has consistently ranked as one of the most under-connected in the country.

But this could be about to change.

The 5G Rural First project, a consortium of more than 30 organisations, has been running trials with local businesses, using bespoke 5G networks, for the past 18 months.

Now, a landmark decision from Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, means these trials could become reality sooner that anticipated.

The regulator says it is opening up unused parts of the airwaves, also known as spectrum, to rural communities.

The unused spectrum is mostly owned by mobile phone companies but will now be sold to anyone who identifies a legitimate use for it.

It will be allocated on a first-come first-served basis, with bids being accepted towards the end of the year.

If accepted, the bidder will have to cover costs only, which Ofcom says could be as low as £85 for a business wanting to create its own local network.

Ofcom is to give businesses and rural communities the opportunity to build bespoke mobile networks by releasing licensed but unused spectrum on a local basis.

The regulator is inviting applications for the 1800MHz and 2300MHz bands currently used for mobile services, the 3.4-3.8GHz band used for 5G, and the 26GHz millimetre-wave (mmWave) band earmarked for high capacity 5G services.

Although mobile operators hold licenses to some of these airwaves, they do not make use of them in parts of the country. Where an operator is not making use of the spectrum, Ofcom wants to see the potential realised.

Ofcom believes spectrum sharing could allow manufacturers to create private networks for connected factories, farmers to build local networks across large sites to connect people and machinery – enabling the Internet of Things (IOT) – and business and holiday parks to improve connectivity.

It would also pave the way for rural areas not covered by the commercial rollout of 4G and 5G to build local networks for residents.

Any party wanting to take advantage of the new regulations needs to submit an application to Ofcom with details of the band, location, bandwidth and power required. Ofcom will then assess the potential for interference with other users of the spectrum and grant a licence based on a per-area or per-base station basis.

Ofcom is looking at other ways to improve rural coverage. If a reported deal between government and mobile operators to build masts in rural areas is not reached, then Ofcom plans to offer discounted 5G spectrum in exchange for coverage obligations at the next auction of airwaves.

According to the regulator’s Connected Nations 2018 report, almost all properties can receive a good indoor 4G signal from at least one operator while 77 per cent are covered by all four major networks – EE, O2, Three and Vodafone – up from 65 per cent last year.

However, while 83 per cent of urban premises receive what could be classified as “good” coverage, only 41 per cent of rural properties do, and in some areas there is no coverage at all.

Rural communities have been “ignored” and had “inappropriate” policies forced upon them, a report says.

A group of peers said a new agenda for the countryside was needed similar to the government’s industrial strategy.

Priorities included improving mobile and broadband connections, replacing lost bank and bus services and tackling social isolation, the House of Lords Rural Economy Committee said.

The government said it was committed to “rural proofing” policies.

Ministers plan to spend £3.5bn on supporting economic development in the countryside by the end of 2020 through the Rural Development Programme.

The cross-party committee of peers said policies suitable for urban and suburban areas had too often been foisted upon the countryside.

As well as improving communications, it is calling for action to address the supply and cost of housing and a lack of training for people working in rural industries.

“Successive governments have underrated the contribution rural economies can make to the nation’s prosperity and wellbeing,” it said.

“They have applied policies which are often inappropriate for rural England. This must change. With rural England at a point of major transition, a different approach is needed.”

Lord Foster, the Lib Dem peer and former MP who chairs the committee, said the “clear inequalities” between urban and rural areas could not be allowed to continue.

He called for a policy blueprint of equal ambition to the government’s industrial strategy to realise the potential of struggling and under-performing areas.

Access to high-speed broadband is a major issue for rural communities

The Campaign to Protect Rural England said too few politicians had a real understanding of the needs of the countryside, despite the fact one in five of the population lived there.

It said investment was needed in housing and other infrastructure to make market towns and villages attractive places to live and work.

“A failure to address the unique and specific needs of these communities has put them at risk of being left behind,” said its chief executive Crispin Truman.

Telecoms regulator Ofcom warned last year of a widening urban-rural divide in broadband provision.

Only 41% of rural premises received a mobile data link of of 2Mbps or higher, it found, compared with 83% in urban areas.

The government has set aside £200m to fund full fibre broadband connections in rural and hard-to-reach areas across the UK by 2033.

“We will continue to champion the countryside, driving forward high-speed broadband in hard-to-reach places, increasing housing availability in rural areas and supporting the creation of more than 6,000 jobs through our dedicated fund for rural businesses,” it said.

Almost 250,000 public sector workers could lose their jobs to robots over the next 15 years, according to a new report which claims machines would be more efficient and save billions of pounds.

Reform, a right-of-centre thinktank, says websites and artificial intelligence “chat bots” could replace up to 90% of Whitehall’s administrators, as well as tens of thousands in the NHS and GPs’ surgeries, by 2030 – saving as much as £4bn a year.

Even nurses and doctors could fall victim to the march of the machines, which the report says can outperform humans at some diagnoses and routine surgical procedures, and are more efficient at collecting information.

The report argues that public services should become more flexible by embracing a gig economy where workers support themselves through a variety of flexible jobs acquired through online platforms.

In remarks that seem set to infuriate unions, a Reform press release says: “Public services can become the next Uber, using the gig economy to employ locum doctors and supply teachers.”

Few complex roles, it suggests, will be able to resist the move towards automation, with the aim that public services will eventually become “diamond-shaped”, as both frontline and strategic roles are replaced by computers.

“Twenty percent of public-sector workers hold strategic, ‘cognitive’ roles,” it says. “They will use data analytics to identify patterns – improving decision-making and allocating workers most efficiently.

“The NHS, for example, can focus on the highest risk patients, reducing unnecessary hospital admissions. UK police and other emergency services are already using data to predict areas of greatest risk from burglary and fire.”

More than 850,000 public sector jobs could be lost by 2030 through automation, according to a study that comes as a further blow after hundreds of thousands of jobs disappeared following the government’s austerity cuts.

The research conducted by Oxford University and Deloitte, the business advisory firm, found that the 1.3m administrative jobs across the public sector had the highest chance of being automated.

But even teachers, police officers and social workers could be replaced, at least in part, allowing the government to either free up more staff for frontline work or reduce the number of workers on the payroll.

The research is included in Deloitte’s state of the state report, which analyses the state of public finances and the challenges facing public services.

Deloitte’s previous work has shown that all sectors will be affected by automation in the next two decades, with 74% of jobs in transportation and storage, 59% in wholesale and retail trades and 56% in manufacturing having a high chance of being automated.

However, in contrast to the doomsayers who predict mass unemployment, the firm has argued that over the last 140 years automation has created more work than it destroyed.