Wireless Broadband ISP Wildanet Raise £1m to Grow UK Rural Reach

Fixed wireless broadband ISP Wildanet is on course to complete a successful crowdfunding raise of over £1m thanks to at least 320 investors. This will enable them to expand their network to reach around 12,000 customers in some increasingly remote rural parts of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and possibly even South Wales.

At present more than 90% of premises within Cornwall are believed to have access to a “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) network and it’s one of the only parts of the UK with a significant coverage of Openreach’s (BT) ultrafast FTTP “full fibre” (FTTP) network. Under the Superfast Cornwall project the county also holds a general ambition to deliver 99% coverage of superfast broadband by the end of 2020.

The situation in Cornwall has however left a fair few communities with poor coverage and this is where Wildanet comes in (assuming the forthcoming 10Mbps+ USO from 2020 doesn’t solve them first). The ISP is still fairly young but they’ve already built a 50Mbps capable wireless broadband network for homes around The Lizard (peninsula), with speeds rising up to 1Gbps for business connections.

The aforementioned network is currently said to cover 4,000 premises in Cornwall but they’d like to go much further and are now targeting 12,000 premises across several nearby counties. In order to do that the ISP set-up a Crowdfunding pitch with Crowdcube.com and last week they surpassed their initial £1 million funding target.

The amount raised so far includes £500,000 of proposed investment by the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Investment Fund (CIoSIF) managed by FSE Fund Managers, which is still subject to due diligence.

Wildanet’s Investment Pitch

To address demand and provide choice, Wildanet has developed a sustainable Fixed Wireless Network model to deploy into topographically challenged areas such as Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and South Wales. Competition in Cornwall (which is consistently lacking), means little choice and is why Wildanet plan to focus there immediately to grab a large market share.

In 5 months they have built an Operations Centre as well as network around The Lizard, passing over 4,000 homes and businesses – a hugely cost effective passing rate compared to fibre or satellite. A successful trial in Gweek has resulted in some early delighted customers and full marketing is now underway.

The management team believe the quality of service and simple pricing structure will help them obtain over 12,000 customers in the next 3 years.

We’ve not seen many ISPs use the crowdfunding approach before (although we have seen a few communities adopt it to help co-fund deployments with ISPs) and so it will be interesting to see how Wildanet gets on over the coming years.

Not all wireless providers have been successful over the longer-term and it’s unclear how much take-up Wildanet has managed to convert in their existing network area, but we wish them well. A video on the project can be found below and credits to one of our members (Glovepup) for spotting this.