Compare broadband for rural areas

If you’re based a long way from the nearest town, this could affect your broadband options. Just under half of rural homes are yet to get a full fibre connection, although countryside dwellers are more likely to pay for faster speeds where they are available.¹

Put your postcode into our broadband comparison tool, then choose your address from the dropdown and we’ll show you results that apply to exactly where you live.

Rural broadband at a glance

• Homes in rural parts of the UK are a lot less likely to have access to full fibre broadband - 52% compared to 71% in towns and cities.¹
• Where full fibre is available, people in rural areas are more likely to connect to it than their city-dwelling counterparts. Ofcom says that take-up of full fibre is significantly higher in the countryside than in urban areas.¹
• Rural areas are driving the growth in satellite broadband as people with poor or non-existent wired connections seek alternatives.¹
• Broadband on the 4G or 5G mobile networks is another alternative to wired broadband, but cities get the lion’s share of coverage here too.¹

What makes rural broadband different?

The UK government classes your home as “rural” if the place you live in has fewer than 10,000 inhabitants.² That includes small towns and sizeable villages as well as genuinely remote areas, so there’s a lot of variation within this category. But in general, rural homes are less likely to have access to full fibre broadband.

There are a few reasons why the full fibre broadband rollout has been slower in rural parts of the UK:

• The denser the population of an area, the lower the cost per household of installing fibre connections (because you can use shorter fibres).³
• Rural areas have more features that make broadband installation tricky. Think lakes, hills and woodland.
• Getting the landowner’s permission to install the fibres can be less straightforward in the countryside.

A lot of rural broadband is delivered through Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC). It’s sometimes also called part fibre or hybrid fibre. This means a speedy fibre connection as far as your nearest street cabinet, then copper telephone wires to your actual address. With the old-style copper wires, the distance from the nearest cabinet really makes a difference to the speeds you can get.

Cable: probably not an option

Cable broadband can achieve fast speeds but it’s not a common way to deliver rural broadband. The main provider of cable broadband in the UK is Virgin Media, but they tend to focus on towns and cities. As ever, it’s worth using our postcode checker to get accurate options for your address.

Types of rural broadband solutions

Your broadband options depend on exactly where you live - put your postcode into our checker and you’ll only get results that are relevant to you.

Full fibre

Just over half of rural homes have the option of full fibre broadband. It’s the most expensive but fastest option. Use our postcode checker to see if it’s available at your address.

Hybrid fibre

Hybrid fibre, also called Fibre to the Cabinet or FTTC, is the next best thing if you can’t get full fibre. It means older-style telephone wires go from your home to the nearest connection point in the fibre network (usually a roadside cabinet). It’s a very common way to get rural broadband. In theory, hybrid fibre can achieve speeds of up to 80Mbps, but the limiting factor will be the link between your home and the cabinet. Actual speeds could be much lower.

ADSL

This uses the landline phone network to carry a broadband signal. It’s the oldest and slowest type of service and obsolete in many parts of the UK, including rural areas. But in remote places with no cable or fibre network it might be the only wired connection you can get. If that’s the case for you, it’s worth exploring options like mobile or satellite broadband instead.

Satellite broadband

Ofcom says that satellite broadband connections in the UK doubled in 2024, from 42,000 to 87,000.⁴ Most of these new customers were in rural areas, and a significant number were in places with no wired internet connection. You’ll need to get a satellite dish installed; the process is very similar to getting satellite TV. Satellite broadband is usually one of the most expensive ways to get your internet but it could be a game-changer if your wired connection is poor or non-existent.

Broadband on the 4G or 5G network

Another option to bypass the need for a wired connection is broadband on the mobile network. With 4G and 5G broadband, your router has a SIM card (like a mobile phone) and converts mobile signals into wifi. But this won’t work if the mobile signal to your property is poor. Mobile data coverage has historically been better in urban areas, but that’s changing with the government’s Shared Rural Network scheme.⁵ This set a target of delivering 4G coverage to 95% of the UK by December 2025 and has delivered it early.⁶

Why compare rural internet options with Go.Compare?

If you live in a rural area, your broadband options depend heavily on exactly where you are. You don’t want to waste time looking at deals that aren’t even available for your address, so the Go.Compare search will save you time and annoyance. In 2024, over 16,000 people signed up with home broadband deals through us.

High speed internet for rural areas - how far have we come?

What a difference five years makes…but there’s still an urban/rural connectivity divide.

In 2019...	In 2024...
79% of homes in rural areas had access to superfast broadband, compared to 97% of homes in urban areas.7 (Superfast is defined as achieving download speeds of 30Mbps, which seemed a lot faster in 2019.)	98% of UK homes have access to superfast broadband, although the 2% still without access are predominantly in rural areas. 2024 saw a boost in access for rural Scotland specifically.8
Full fibre coverage in the UK was at 10%, up from 3% two years before that.9 The government launched a scheme focused on connecting rural and remote areas.10	Full fibre is now available to nearly seven in 10 UK households, but rural broadband lags behind: 52% of countryside homes have access versus 71% of urban homes.11 The government announced fresh investment to target rural areas, including South Yorkshire and the Scilly Isles.12
9% of the UK did not have good outdoor 4G coverage from any operator. These spots with poor signal were mainly concentrated in rural areas.	Areas with bad 4G coverage are now below 5% of the UK’s total landmass. (This is mainly thanks to the Shared Rural Network programme.) This makes 4G a more realistic option for rural broadband users.9
The first 5G network reached the UK, but it was limited to six cities (including Go.Compare’s home of Cardiff).13	5G is more widely available but there’s still a city/countryside divide: available in 42% of urban sites but only 16% of rural ones.14

How to improve broadband speed in rural areas

If your home internet seems slow, run our broadband speed test to see exactly what speed you’re getting. (You might need to run it a few times to get a more accurate picture.) There are various ways to improve your experience, like moving your router - see our tips for speeding up your internet connection.

But with rural broadband, the problem can be bigger than a faulty router. It might be an infrastructure issue affecting your whole area.

Your right to a decent connection

Did you know that you have the legal right to a “decent” broadband connection? This is defined as a download speed of at least 10Mbps and an upload speed of 1Mbps or more.¹⁵ If you don’t have access to this, the Ofcom site explains how you can request one. But this could take up to two years.

Fibre Community Partnerships

In the meantime, there’s hope that the full fibre rollout will reach your area. BT Openreach is aiming for a “balanced build”, which means that a “fair proportion” of the work happens in rural areas. But this still leaves a lot of rural areas out.

Check if your part of the UK is in the full fibre build plan using BT’s postcode tool and if not, register your interest by selecting “Keep me updated”.

Areas not in the plan could still be eligible for a Fibre Community Partnership, but this requires work from you and your neighbours. The steps for the voucher-funded option are roughly as follows.

• Fill in an Expression of Interest form to find out if your community meets the criteria
• BT reviews it and tells you if you’re eligible for a fully-funded solution
• As many people as possible apply for a voucher under the government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme and upload them to a dedicated online portal
• If the technical survey doesn’t show any problems and the value of the vouchers is equal to the cost of the work, the fibre rollout goes ahead for your community.¹⁷

It’s a slow process and requires a lot of community participation to collect enough vouchers. But if you’re seriously fed up of slow broadband in your area and nobody is doing anything about it, this is a way to take control.

If you can’t collect enough vouchers, there is also the option of community fundraising to cover part or all of the costs.

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