Rural Broadband ISP Voneus Restructures Management Team

UK ISP Voneus, which builds Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband networks in rural parts of England, today restructured its senior management team by announcing three key appointments to help boost their future roll-out plans.

The move follows on from last year’s news, which saw the provider secure a fresh investment of £30m from Macquarie Capital to help grow their network coverage toward 900,000 UK premises (here). Voneus now aims to “rapidly scale operations in order to deliver much-needed broadband services to remote communities.”

The ISP will need to be particularly careful going forward as we’ve seen a number of providers, such as Gigaclear, run into trouble in the past as they’ve tried to rapidly scale up operations. Growing too fast from a smaller base can create all sorts of complicated problems and getting the management team right is a vital first step.

As part of the aforementioned effort the provider has created several new positions inside their senior management circle. The positions are set to be filled by Sue Barnes as Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), Mark Bennett as Chief Operations Officer (COO) and Ilan Scorah as the ISP’s Head of Strategy. All have quite a bit of experience behind them.

Steve Leighton, CEO of Voneus, said:

“During the last six months, we’ve put into motion some truly ambitious plans to connect more communities, more quickly than ever before; having the right people on the team is essential if we are going to hit our goals.

Sue, Mark and Ilan bring with them a diverse array of skills and experience in both the telecoms and media markets. They understand what it takes to deliver innovative, high-quality services at scale, so will all play central roles as we continue to ramp up our operations in order to bring an end to the current digital divide.”

Barnes joins Voneus with more than three decades of experience in the digital and traditional media industries, including at ESI Media, and will be responsible for overseeing all commercial strategy and activities for business and residential projects including sales, marketing and customer experience.

Meanwhile Bennett is Virgin Media’s former head of strategy for its consumer division and will oversee the expansion of Voneus’ FWA and fibre infrastructures, as well as head up the company’s entire network, service delivery and engineering operations.

Finally, Scorah will be responsible for Voneus’ product roadmap and service innovation, as well as the company’s long-term market proposition. He joins after a long stint at BT, where he held senior roles in the company’s consumer division and headed up the team responsible for regulatory affairs and commercial relationship with Openreach.