Some of you might remember that Geo Networks decided not to be a part of the UK Government’s grand broadband delivery plan, and according to Entanet UK this was not good news for the country’s competition.
As a quick reminder, Geo stated last week the strategy “automatically favoured dominant networks” and failed to guarantee public sector funds. It also said that discrepancies that surrounded pricing to access BT’s PIA did not help either.
According to Entanet’s Head of Service Operations, Neil Watson, there was a possibility that local authorities and smaller broadband delivery projects no longer believed that BDUK was the key to the country’s broadband progressing.
He wrote on the company’s blog:
“It’s reported that the council for Bath and North East Somerset have decided not to use the BDUK’s £670,000 funding which would then require the council to invest £1million of their own money in order to fund superfast broadband roll-out throughout the area because it’s too expensive.”
He also stated:
“The importance of the BDUK and the Government’s plans for superfast broadband have already helped sway Ofcom to force BT to reduce its original PIA pricing but Geo Networks (and other potential suppliers) believe this has not gone far enough and their withdrawal from future bids has serious implications for the delivery of superfast broadband to rural and hard to reach locations.
“This means the BDUK are likely to become more reliant on the main existing broadband network providers such as BT and Virgin Media to reach the last third, which has obvious negative implications on competition within the market.”
Of course, the coin always has two sides, some said that Geo’s exit did not matter that much, seen as it was not a major player anyway.
It might be still too early to come up with conclusions but Broadbandwatcher is indeed watching this space.
