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Borderlands 5G Innovation Regions (5GIR) Programme
Rural tourism is a key part of the Borderlands economy, advanced wireless technology can enhance how we tell the story of Borderlands communities, build the tourist economy, protect our environment and local businesses, improve how we delivery rural services and collect information to support future investment.
In December 2023, following a competitive bid process during summer 2023, the Borderlands Region was awarded £3.8m of funding by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to deliver a programme to demonstrate the commercial opportunities for advanced wireless technology in a rural tourism setting. The funding is managed by Cumberland Council on behalf of the Borderlands Partners and must be spent by March 2025 but during the lifetime of the initial programme the Borderlands Partners will explore opportunities for follow on funding or other options to expand the programme. The programme is run and managed by Connecting Cumbria.
Targeting the deployment of 5G technology across five key venues thanks to the 5G Innovation Regions (5GIR) programme.
The initial programme will focus on commercially viable and sustainable use of 5G technology to meet a mixture of use cases at five venues:
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Destination Tweed at The Crook Inn
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Kielder Castle and Forest
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Stranraer Marina
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The Sill at Hadrian’s Wall
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Windermere 5G Ferry
These projects have been chosen because they can be delivered and replicated. We will design into these stackable use cases a range of options to ensure sustainability and encourage further commercialisation during delivery. Learning from these projects, especially with respect to commercial sustainability, will be used to demonstrate the benefits of the technology and support our strategy to roll out to more sites as part of The Borderlands renewed Digital Infrastructure Strategy.
During 2024/25 the programme will deploy private 5G network coverage at each of the programme venues and this coverage will be used to deploy use-cases e.g. support for ferry operations, water and air quality monitoring and web-cam connectivity. The programme will consider if layering together a variety of different use cases, and encouraging our supplier to develop their own commercialisation plans, will allow the services deployed at the initial programme venues to become fully self-supporting and therefore provide an exemplar for future similar commercialisation of 5G technology across The Borderlands.
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