Asked by: John Lamont (Conservative - Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of strengthening future license conditions for the 5G spectrum auction in order to improve telephone and data signal in remote parts of the UK.
Answered by Margot James
The regulator Ofcom is responsible for enforcing spectrum licence obligations and it is assessing whether mobile network operators have met their licence obligations that were agreed in 2014. Ofcom plans to publish its assessment in early 2018. In 2017 the Government granted Ofcom new powers to issue fines to mobile operators in the event that they do not meet their licence obligations.
Asked by: John Lamont (Conservative - Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what proportion of rural premises in (a) Scotland, (b) Wales and (c) England have access to superfast broadband.
Answered by Margot James
Ofcom's 2017 Connected Nations report includes the following percentages in figure 5, measuring superfast availability at 30Mbit/s in May 2017, showing percentage point changes from a year earlier (pp).
| Urban coverage, % premises | Rural coverage, % premises |
UK | 95% (↑2pp) | 66% (↑7pp) |
England | 95% (↑1pp) | 69% (↑6pp) |
Northern Ireland | 97% (↑1pp) | 57% (↑5pp) |
Scotland | 94% (↑4pp) | 56% (↑10pp) |
Wales | 96% (↑3pp) | 66% (↑10pp) |
Source: Ofcom analysis of operator data