FROM THE INDUSTRY
Obtaining wayleaves and navigating the rural Welsh landscape can’t have been easy. It wasn’t. Ogi can’t yet claim to be a hyper- rural provider. We didn’t start by aiming our efforts at the 50-100 home hamlet - and relying on Gigabit vouchers for the top-up - because of the economic and practical considerations of that approach. But if we build out Abergavenny, then it’s easier for us to get up the road to Gilwein then Crickhowell. And before you know it, we can start to stitch in those smaller places, funds permitting. As ever, obtaining wayleaves is critical and we estimate around 20% of our target coverage will be impacted by wayleave (more in holiday areas): holiday parks, housing associations and private roads, etc. If you don’t tackle this in good time, you don’t get to release or connect the premises, despite all those overheads in getting there. It quickly becomes a major obstacle to progress. It must be heartbreaking in instances where you just can’t progress down that route. It really is, because you committed a lot of planning, time and money to get to that point; the cabinet’s erected in the road, the cables are in the ducts and on the poles,
What does that mean to your company? It means we’ve a path through to gradual growth, we’re able to keep maximising customer numbers (which also requires capital) and provides us with a clear path to trade to profitability. More recently we’ve dialled up our B2B efforts too, with new networks deployed into the denser, commercial areas. South Wales is a real hot spot for tech industry (fintech, DCs, microprocessor design, multimedia, etc) and with many interesting smaller businesses in incubation too. Wales really does need a local provider, not just to help those businesses with connectivity, but with a suite of cloud and managed services as well. How do you see the industry looking in the next two years? Opinions vary. We will see consolidation, sure, there are far too many operators today and many will struggle – it it’s not going to be uniform. No sudden appearance of just 3 providers UK-wide. For altnets with a wholesale orientation who’ve achieved scale between 50,000-250,000, I think we’ll see more rapid consolidation as they seek scale to attract household ISPs to monetise their assets. If you haven’t got the customers, you haven’t got the revenues. So far, we’ve seen more consolidation between operators with the
the backhaul and power are finally in but now 100 homes can’t get your service, many of whom are now expecting it. What is your plan for expansion; are you going to stick with South Wales? Along with the rest of the fibre industry, our initial investments came in from equity investors, with expectations that we would gear up with cheaper debt soon after. Sadly, with fibre market developments, much of that debt just isn’t available now. The industry has a job of work to do to show that it has made good decisions and that returns can be made. It hasn’t helped that several of the larger, wholesale operators have failed to meet their targets, with their primary focus on rollout. To that end, they have routinely overbuilt each other to ‘land grab’, haven’t brought the customers on fast enough and aren’t generating the revenues to get to break even. This has spooked the debt market, creating an industry wide problem, even if you’re performing well. That said, Ogi had a big win last year, working with the Cardiff Capital Region, which represents 10 local authorities in the Southeast of Wales. They are an investment arm with money to invest in worthwhile Welsh projects and they chose to back Ogi. Timely support when the debt market was so challenging and allowing Ogi to carry on building, albeit slower.
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May 2025 Volume 47 No.2
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