Budget 2020: Government confirms £5bn broadband boost
Chancellor Rishi Sunak today confirmed that the government will pump £5bn into its plan to roll out full-fibre broadband across the UK.
The broadband pledge formed a major part of the Conservatives’ election manifesto as part of its promise to “level up” the UK.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson last year laid out an ambitious pledge to deliver the next-generation network to every home in the UK by 2025.
Gigabit-capable broadband, which is 40 times faster than standard superfast broadband, is set to be delivered in the 20 per cent of the country that is hardest to reach, with more than 5m homes and businesses benefitting.
Mark Williams, managing director at Berkeley Research Group, welcomed the efforts to improve broadband coverage.
“The challenge for the government and for Ofcom is to ensure that this public funding is used quickly, efficiently and does not replace private investment that the operators would have made anyway,” he added.
Shares in BT, whose Openreach division has outlined plans to reach 15m homes with full-fibre broadband by the mid 2020s, were up more than three per cent on the announcement. Earlier this week BT said it will launch its new gigabit home broadband service to consumers across the UK later this month.
In addition, Sunak today said the government would invest £510m into a partnership with the UK’s mobile operators in a bid to elimited so-called signal not-spots in rural areas.
The £1bn mast-sharing deal, which was first outlined in October last year, will bring extra coverage to 280,000 premises and 16,000km of road. The industry will collectively fund up to £532m of the project.
The tie-up follows months of wrangling between the UK’s four mobile operators — O2, Vodafone, BT and Three — who disagreed over the terms.
The talks came close to collapsing after EE owner BT, which has the largest network of the British operators, proposed charging higher rates on some of its sites.
City A.M. understands a compromise has now been reached, which will see BT operating its own equipment in some areas.
As a result, the government has been forced to scale back plans to provide coverage from all four operators. However, it has pledged to deliver 95 per cent combined coverage across the whole of the UK by the end of 2025.
Hamish MacLeod, director of trade body Mobile UK, said the partnership was “unprecedented in both its scope and its ambition”.