Rural business broadband cost 'is immoral'

The high cost of business broadband in rural parts of the UK has been described by one entrepreneur as "immoral".

Oli Christie, managing director of mobile games studio Neon Play, says he has been forced to pay £8,000 a year for his broadband supply.

Speaking to Cable.co.uk, he stated that more needs to be done to bring business broadband to rural areas. The government's rural broadband scheme has been regularly criticised.

Mr Christie's company is based in a former museum in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, and initially relied on a normal business broadband line before that became unworkable.

Neon Play then had to upgrade to a fibre optic leased line at a cost of £8,000 in order to get the speeds needed to run the company in an effective manner.

Mr Christie said: "Some areas of Cirencester have got 100Mbps but our area hasn’t, maybe because it's not populated so much with houses or businesses or whatever it is.

"But there are lots of businesses, there are a lot of employees in the area, a lot of shops and estate agents, and we're all crying out for it. It's just immoral, quite frankly, that I'm having to pay £8,000 for it and another business is having to pay £6,000 for it, everyone's having to do their own thing."

The business owner suggested that the lack of business broadband options for rural companies is going to make it harder for them to be competitive.

He said: "You feel like second-class citizens. We export to 160 countries, we're one of the best mobile games companies in the world yet we're like a third world country."

The government currently has a voucher scheme to help organisations to improve their business broadband connections, but take-up of the programme has been low so far.

Businesses looking to move services into the cloud should evaluate the performance of their existing network and consider setting up a leased line or MPLS network.

(Image: Kainet)