In reply to a post by 405mi16:

Thing is this area is so sparsely populated over such great distances, fibre is the only way we'd ever get anything over 1meg (apart from satellite, but that's not ideal either...).

Your best hope I suspect is the LTE 800mhz licence that O2 just won in this week's auction. That licence (out of the 5 sold) has a condition that it cover a serious amount of the country.

800mhz has quite good propagation, so one central mast, and external antennas and you might see speeds that my work colleagues in the US are getting on their 700mhz LTE. e.g. 40meg download and 10meg uploads.

I suspect that is the Govt's hope for rural areas, as wireless technologies are a lot cheaper to deploy than cabling areas, either through digging or running on poles.