BT has been unable to deliver high speed broadband to the UK village of Lyddington so the residents have raised £37,000 to launch their own network. 

Several telecom companies had said it was uneconomical to provide fast services to the village ,but Rutland Telecom can now offer the residents of Lyddington speeds of up to 40Mbps

The Rutland Telecom scheme was a joint effort between villagers and a local ICT company that was reselling BT’s broadband.

Dr David Lewis , Managing Director of Rutland Telecom was reported to have said” We found that any company could do, on a smaller scale, what Carphone Warehouse has done and take over BT’s network.”

They approached Openreach, the BT spin-off  responsible for the UK’s network, to supply fibre optic cable to a street cabinet in the village. It was quite a slow process and the Ofcom regulator did intervene  regularly , but after 2 years the network is up and running and already has 50 customers. The telephone lines of these customers are now completely cut off from the local BT exchange and running independantly.

Rutland Telecom have now been approached by 40 other rual community groups interested in a similar network for their own areas.

It was reported that BT said that they were delighted to help Rutland Telecom although they added that they hoped that other service providers would be allowed access to the new network.