County Broadband

We believe the delicate relationship between subscription offers and sustainable delivery in the final third is one that should not be ignored – and at the very least, those companies unwilling to commit to providing rural broadband provision to genuinely low-population areas should NOT receive additional grant aid or government funding simply to compete with the large telcos in existing markets.

At the highest level – the main telcos long ago decided lowering the price-point for urban and semi-urban provision, was more important than charging a rate that supported investment in rural delivery.  While such market forces may have been good for the urban consumer, until companies like ours emerged to re-dress the balance, it was bad news for the rural dweller.

The extent to which this occurs (and the extent to which this radiates toward the more higher populated reas of the rural community) is directly related to the ability of companies such as ours to provide reasonably priced services to the remaining minority.  This is consistent with our experience that the deeper into the final third we venture, the more resource dependent the deployment and management of the network becomes, particularly in relation to network design.

There is now a new development;  an emergence of companies ‘cashing-in’ on lower entry deployment costs enabled by new technology to provide low-cost services in urban areas, and, because of the lower entry costs, extending services into semi-rural/mid-sized population areas.  Taking on the larger telcos in a price war in their own back yard is one thing, but when they venture toward the next tier of mid-sized population aeras, without being willing to include the more costly deeper rural network deployments, then the opportunity for companies who would normally have considered this mid-population market a route to supporting the delivery of their more rural neighbours is further removed.

Companies genuinely interested in true rural deployment (such as County Broadband) and in addressing the needs of the final third of the market (those hardest to reach), are therefore further disadvantaged by this latest development – where stacking-it-high-and-selling-it-cheap only serves to further extend the much spoken of “digital divided”.

At the same time, the rural consumer should be aware that it is not sustainable to charge supermarket prices for a high-quality, professional service in areas that have corner shop footfalls.  The basic economics simply do not stack-up.