B4RN are great but they're unique, primarily because they have local access to backhaul fibre. There are some key fibre routes travelling through their area and

B4RN are great but they're unique, primarily because they have local access to backhaul fibre. There are some key fibre routes travelling through their area and there are existing fibres (originally used to connect local schools) that run to the nearby Lancaster University (where the CEO of B4RN used to work), and from there onto Telecity in Manchester. Organising a fibre across some fields and your neighbours gardens is one thing, but connecting into the national fibre network can be quite another, especially for "real" remote villages where the nearest fibre point is many miles away. Of course you then have to lease the fibre capacity too which is very expensive (£20k-40k+ a year for 10Gb backhaul) and ultimately at the operator's discretion, some operators will just not sell to customers who they see as direct competition. I seem to recall in B4RN's case they had such a clash with BT that they pretty much burnt their bridges with them for any future assistance. This lack of existing infrastructure is why you couldn't (cost effectively) replicate B4RN in rural Wales for example, even if you had fibre to all of the houses in a village.