Karen is encouraging residents in Staffordshire Moorlands to take part in the Government's consultation on how new masts might help improve mobile connectivity.
Karen said,
“The quickest and cheapest way to get fast connections to people’s homes and businesses is by upgrading existing cabinets to fibre-optic cables so that superfast broadband can be supplied down existing wires. But there are problems with this. If your home is too far from the cabinet, the degradation of the signal down the copper wire means you can see no real improvement - a problem that I experience myself at home even in the middle of Leek.
In built up residential areas, too many people also often want access to the same cabinet and that means speeds are not as fast as they should be. The alternatives to upgrading cabinets are using satellites, which are costly and affected by the weather – so not great in the Moorlands sometimes – or full fibre direct to your home, which is unfortunately still prohibitively expensive for many rural communities.”
The Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport have recently launched a consultation on how new masts might help to improve mobile connectivity. The consultation, ‘Proposed reforms to permitted development rights to support the deployment of 5G and extend mobile coverage’ is open on the Gov.uk website until 4 November.
The consultation can be found here: