DAVID Cameron has renewed his pledge to help rural communities in broadband "not-spots", having had to cut short his own coastal holidays due to poor phone signal coverage.
The Prime Minister said he had to dart home from Cornwall - a long-standing domestic holiday destination for the Camerons - in 2011 and 2013, as a lack of signal hampered his ability to keep updated on the fall of colonel Muammar Gaddafi, and the Syrian conflict, respectively.
Mr Cameron said: "This is a really big issue for people all over the country - the 'not-spots'. It's not good enough to say here's the mobile coverage for the whole country. You have got to recognise a lot of people are making important calls while they are on the move."
Ministers are already discussing plans to negotiate with mobile phone operators and asking them to help increase coverage by sharing phone masts, which would allow for the introduction of national roaming in the UK.
National roaming sees phones switching from one operator to another when service is not available through a particular provider, which is what happens when people travel abroad.
It would address the problem of partial "not-spots", areas where only some of the major networks are available.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article