Broadband ISP Voneus Criticised for Leaving Rural Brecon Homes Disconnected

Alternative rural UK broadband network Voneus has been criticised after a network fault resulted in two premises in villages near Brecon (Wales) losing connectivity, which by itself wouldn’t be a huge development. But in this case, the provider later chose to “decommission” the service rather than repair it, leaving those affected offline.

Just to recap. Voneus has been struggling a bit recently with complaints in some areas about network performance (here and here), redundancies and a slowdown in their network roll-out (here). This came after the operator also found itself having to withdraw from their publicly funded Project Gigabit broadband contract for Mid West Shropshire (here), which has since been picked up by Openreach (here). But a recent funding deal appeared to signal a potential improvement for the future (here).

Unfortunately, Voneus has now come under fire for how they’ve handled the recent loss of service around part of remote rural Brecon. According to the Brecon & Radnor Express, the disruption is currently known to have impacted two households, including Chris Davies from Cwmachau Farm in Lower Chapel, who claims to have received no warning and that monthly payments were still being taken.

“We have a holiday enterprise on the farm and emails and spreadsheets are essential 100 per cent of the time. Wi-Fi is also needed for the holiday accommodation,” said Chris. “The last six months have proved disastrous with Voneus, with a slowing down of the service, outages one after the other, and guarantees to repair which never took place.” The service is then said to have “disappeared altogether” in October.

The outage is understood to have been caused after an Army vehicle, which was allegedly said to be travelling down an unauthorised road, somehow damaged a power cable. But apparently the cost and complexity of restoring the service has now been deemed too high.

A spokesperson for Voneus said:

“As a business we always striving to keep customers connected. Third-party damage caused a broadband outage for two customers. After confirming all alternative solutions were not viable, Voneus made a decision to de-commission. Customer communications were sent to all impacted residents from the outset.”

Local Councillor Iain McIntosh, who said he helped to establish the original network in 2018, commented that it is “completely unacceptable for a broadband provider to simply switch people off rather than repair and maintain the service they pay for“.

At the time of writing it’s unclear whether both homes might be able to access a 4G or 5G based mobile broadband service as an alternative, but consumers in such areas can often access ultrafast broadband via Starlink’s satellite network in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), although this does tend to be a bit more expensive.