5G roll-out ‘will blight Britain with thousands more masts’

BRINGING high-speed mobile phone coverage and internet to the forgotten corners of rural Britain will require at least 400,000 extra masts, many of which will need to be 80ft high, experts have predicted.

It has raised fears that the countryside will be blighted by the new network, designed to support the latest 5G technology for phones and broadband.

In this month’s Budget, Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, pledged to invest £1.1 billion in the development of a 5G network by the early 2020s.

But a recent report by consumer watchdog Which? found that mobile users in half of England cannot even access 4G, while in Wales the faster signal is available for just one third of the time.

At a briefing in London, experts from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), King’s College London, and the universities of Surrey and Sussex warned that people living in the countryside may have to accept 80ft (25 metre) masts to enjoy the faster service.

More than 10 times the current 30-40,000 masts and base stations will be needed for full coverage across the country, they warned. Tom Fyans, director of campaigns and policy at the Campaign to Protect Rural England, said: “We need to ask whether we can deliver the type of coverage being suggested here without markedly harming the character of our precious landscapes.

“Rather than building thousands of ever higher masts at the behest of industry, we need to maintain strong planning protections and help local communities add new infrastructure to existing buildings.”

Prof Will Stewart, of the IET, said the masts would have to be built much taller as “there is nowhere near enough capacity to deliver what we think the system needs, there never has been”.

He added: “Some people may consider them a blight on the landscape but they will have to tolerate it if they want to benefit from the latest technology.”