Rural Broadband ISP Wildanet to Retire Fixed Wireless Network

Alternative network provider Wildanet, which has spent the past few years deploying a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based gigabit broadband network across rural parts of Cornwall and Devon in England, has announced plans to conduct a “phased retirement” of their legacy Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) network.

Just to recap. The internet provider, which has recently suffered some job losses (here) and is currently in the process of changing CEO (here), originally started life in 2017 as a fixed wireless broadband provider for remote rural communities across Cornwall. But in recent years they’ve branched out to focus more on deploying full fibre networks instead of wireless ones.

However, much of the equipment supporting their original FWA network is now said to be “approaching the end of its operational life“, which means it’s becoming “increasingly prone to failure” and is “no longer economically viable to maintain or upgrade“.

Suffice to say that Wildanet have now taken the decision to retire their FWA network and has already begun a project to assist affected customers with transitioning across to an alternative service, in advance of the planned decommissioning. Many of the affected customers have already transitioned over to a new service.

The original timeline to decommission parts of the FWA network was scheduled for June 2025, but this has now been postponed to 31st October 2025 in order to allow more time to transition their remaining customers on to alternative broadband solutions.

Simon Hughes, Chief Commercial Officer at Wildanet, said:

“While the FWA service was an important part of the foundation and early development of Wildanet, some of the supporting infrastructure is no longer economically viable to maintain or upgrade and as a result we have made the difficult decision to retire parts of this older network and focus our efforts on delivering new, more reliable broadband technology.

The Wildanet team will be contacting all remaining customers affected by this change to assist their transition to an alternative broadband service (where they have not already).

Where possible, our teams will help customers move over to an alternative broadband service provided by Wildanet. If that is not currently available at their address, the Wildanet team will assist customers in exploring other options.”

Hopefully this transition won’t result in too many of their remaining FWA subscribers being thrown back to even slower copper-based broadband lines. But we can imagine that this may still be the outcome for some locations.