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The North Norfolk MP, Steff Aquarone, has this week called on local residents and businesses to report problems with their mobile reception and broadband, as he prepares to take the constituency’s “connectivity crisis” directly to the UK Government next week. But anecdotal consumer surveys may not be the most effective way of identifying such problems.
The Government has already acknowledged that not a single project to improve 4G or 5G mobile reception in North Norfolk has received funding or part-funding from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT and now DCMS) between 2022 and 2026. The existing 4G Shared Rural Network (SRN) project is also nearing completion, but none of their future masts will be deployed into this area.
Despite this, Steff says that residents continue to report dropped calls, unreliable reception and areas where their mobile phones simply do not work. Meanwhile, thousands of Norfolk properties were recently removed from the original scope of the Government’s Project Gigabit broadband contract, which is a reference to CityFibre’s recent scaling-back of deployments (here).