In 2011, the UK government set aside £150 million of taxpayer money to improve mobile coverage in the UK, promising to extend it to 99 percent of the population by the end of 2015. However, The Register has discovered that a total of only eight masts have been built since 2011, six of them in the past year. Those masts are said to provide coverage to around 200 homes each, falling far short of the target of 60,000 homes.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), which is in charge of the scheme, partnered with telecoms company Arqiva and four mobile network operators in 2013 in order to try and speed up development. Clearly, this hasn't worked. The DCMS confirmed to The Register that a further 24 sites are in "the contractual build phase," which still falls well short of hitting targets by the extended 2016 completion date. Amusingly (and sadly), if the DCMS continued at the current rate of eight new cell sites per year, it would take about 140 years for the project to be completed.

The DCMS has blamed the delay on difficulty in finding locations to provide the required coverage, citing local planning applications, the availability of power, and site access as barriers to completion. A spokesperson told The Register: "Providing services for remote areas can be extremely complex but as construction has begun on more and more sites the rollout will gather speed. As a result more homes will continue to benefit from improved coverage."

The government’s Major Projects Authority found other issues with the project, too, most tellingly that the projected budget in 2014/15 was £71.5 million, of which only £25.6 million had actually been spent. The MPA has now flagged the project as being at "high risk of failure." The project could potentially join the likes of the scrapped £350 million immigration computer system, and the astonishing £10 billion spent on the now abandoned NHS IT system.