The National Rural Conference 2025

Bookings are now officially open for the National Rural Conference 2025, which will take place online from Monday 15 to Thursday 18 September.
This is the Rural Services Network’s flagship event of the year, bringing together rural decision-makers, practitioners, and advocates for four days of live, interactive sessions focused on the future of rural communities.
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Government's rural network infrastructure plans 'ignore businesses', claims Three

Trade publication IT Pro reports on claims from mobile operator, Three, that the Government is continuing to ignore business use cases across rural and remote areas when rolling out network infrastructure

The report claims that Westminster needs to re-evaluate the way testbeds and trial programmes have been deployed, as their focus to date has been on consumers living in the UK’s countryside and has failed to consider the 551,000 businesses registered in the rural areas of England – 23 per cent of the country's registered businesses.

Three argues that poor connectivity in the rural parts of the country is continuing to cause problems for rural businesses, placing these organisations at a disadvantage compared to their inner-city counterparts.

The report concludes that the UK countryside is still forced to grapple with ‘structural and systemic issues that make it hard and disproportionately expensive to build out networks to those communities’.

Full article:

IT Pro - Government's rural network infrastructure plans 'ignore businesses', claims Three