Voneus Drops Out of Project Gigabit Broadband Contract for Mid West Shropshire
In an unexpected development, the Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has just announced that rural broadband ISP Voneus have “mutually agreed to terminate” the £12m (state aid) Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contract for Mid West Shropshire (Lot 25.01), which would have expanded a full fibre (FTTP) network to 6,000 premises in hard to reach areas.
The contract, which was formally announced in April 2024 (here), would have seen Voneus expand their gigabit broadband network across large areas of rural Shropshire, including Alberbury, Westbury, Snailbeach, Wentnor, Ford, Hanwood, Longden, Dorrington, Leebotwood and Bicton. The first premises under this contract were originally anticipated to have access to gigabit-capable broadband in 2025.
However, in a brief statement released by BDUK a few moments ago, a spokesperson for the agency said: “BDUK and Voneus have mutually agreed to terminate the Project Gigabit contract for Mid West Shropshire. BDUK is now moving swiftly to put in place alternative plans with other suppliers to connect premises that were due to be connected. Voneus has not received any public funding for this contract.”
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At the time of writing, we don’t yet know why this has occurred and are seeking comment from the ISP, although Voneus have recently been the subject of some complaints about service and support quality from various communities, including those in Shropshire (here).
Smaller alternative networks also continue to be under heavy pressure from rising build costs, high interest rates, strong competition and the need to deliver a viable level of service take-up. But Voneus did manage to secure another capital investment worth £20m from Global Connectivity (GCON) – through its investment in Rural Broadband Solutions Holdings Limited (RBSHL) – last month.
UPDATE 10:19am
Voneus has declined to comment.
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Did they jump (no money) or were they pushed (local complaints)? The latter implies that BDUK listens to local residents so my 50p is they’ve run out of money.
Either way things don’t look too bright for them at the minute. Sounds like BDUK has lost confidence in their ability to deliver.
Surprising as they have completed half of my town, and see new connections every day.
Perhaps they will get a move on and do the rest of it (my bit!!)
Also I believe they have had an input of funds from private investors.
Another alt-net had bduk money, still no sign of them.
You are aware that the way BDUK works is that the company awarded the contract only gets paid when they have proven they’ve delivered to the required standard?
So no delivery = no money.
Delivering a service that does not meet the agreed standard = no money
Providers have to build at their own expense and then claim once build is complete and available to the agreed locations. I suspect this is why some are pulling out as they’ve either run out of funding to build or it’s come out much more expensive once the detailed planning has been done.
They are known for not completing builds. My in laws live in Talaton in Devon, they had their drive dug up over 2 years ago and have still not been connected due to various issues including blocked ducts! They are useless!
Can confirm, they installed half of a cabinet in my village a year and a half ago and have proceeded to do exactly nothing since then, they even removed the “we’re coming to your area soon” message from their address checker. Emailed them about it and all they had to say was there were “unexpected issues” reaching our area. Definitely does not give me confidence in them at all.
Our service in Shropshire was perfect when the facility was provided by SWS. Voneus are useless.
They have no idea of what it takes to provide a truly rural wireless network.
They also omitted to provide 4×4 vehicles for their engineers!
I can’t understand why they took over SWS, which were a superb internet supplier.
What’s not to understand? They wanted the customer base.
Then as part of the merger, acquisition or whatever it was, the existing staff and engineers were probably not given any good reason to stick around and decided to leave. Likely new management caused a considerable headache and/or were useless.
Maybe now they’re left without the expertise required to sufficiently run the network.
Source: Been a part of acquisitions before as an engineer, this tends to be how it goes.