Wireless ISP Highland Community Broadband Set to Close in April 2026

Fixed wireless access ISP Highland Community Broadband (HCB) in Scotland, which has served the remote rural Ullapool area of the Scottish Highlands since 2017 (here), has revealed that its service is to be shut down on 30th April 2026 due to “increasing financial difficulty” with rising legal and maintenance costs.

The original network was established with funding from the community and originally sought to cover 1,434 residential premises across quite a wide area, albeit with the aim of connecting 650 customers by July 2017 and 850 by the end of 2017. Customers of the service (400+ of them remain) currently pay from £30 per month (plus £125 one-off for installation), which gets you unlimited downloads and speeds of up to around 50Mbps (variable).

However, the company’s most recent accounts to the end of 2024 revealed that their turnover had fallen sharply to £142.3k (2023: £186.7k) and they also made an operating profit of just £1.3k (2023: £43.6k), which shows the strain they were under. The company only had a single employee to its name for both 2024 and 2023.

According to The National, the admittedly very niche internet provider has been struggling to compete with recent advances in satellite (e.g. Starlink) and local 4G (mobile broadband) connectivity. Not to mention that Openreach has managed to expand their full fibre (FTTP) broadband network into a small part of the same area.

In a post on social media, Topher Dawson on behalf of HCB, said the firm had faced rising financial difficulty with backhaul costs, legal fees for new sites, and maintenance of electronic equipment (recent Storms have been particularly challenging).

Topher Dawson said:

“The network needs improvements and we tried to use the Scottish Government’s R100 voucher scheme to finance them. However this scheme and the UK Government Gigabit scheme seem designed for much larger companies, and in practice the goalposts kept moving.

…

EE and O2 offer home wifi based on mobile phone signal and now the Starlink satellite based system is offering 100 Megabit per second connections for the same price as we charge, £35 per month … None of these technologies were available when HCB was set up, so we have filled a vital gap.”

The provider is understood to have explored a sale of their network, but FWA providers in remote rural areas with maintenance cost issues and diminishing customer bases aren’t exactly the most attractive of prospects. The fact that Starlink has now started offering 100Mbps plans for as little as £35 per month was also a significant discouragement for any potential suitors.

On the flip side, the important thing to remember is that many of those served by this network do now have alternative options, so HCB did the job it set out to do and now the world around them is moving on. You can see the project’s original promotional video below.