BT has beaten community groups to win council contracts to provide rural broadband, according to the BBC, despite campaigners claiming the company is the more expensive option.
Both Oxfordshire and Dorset county councils have penned deals with the telecoms giant for it to provide rural broadband services, meaning alternative schemes are now redundant.
The news comes just five weeks after the public accounts committee slammed the Department for Culture, Media and Sport for allegedly failing to find the required competition for £1.2bn of rural broadband rollout contracts – all 26 of which went to BT.
The government has had to subsidy the rollout because of the relatively small number of people living in the countryside as opposed to urban areas, which had made the business prospect less attractive to big companies.
But now the BBC has reported that community-run broadband schemes in Dorset and Oxfordshire will not go ahead, despite them claiming to be cheaper to run than BT.
Hugo Pickering, head of Cotswolds Broadband in West Oxfordshire, told the BBC: "Oxfordshire County Council has supported this all along but has now decided it is not going to separate it from their contracted plans with BT.
"We have already put in a whole lot of money and so the council is going to be liable for a compensation claim.
"We only wanted 34% of state aid, which is much lower than BT, which in some cases is asking for 90% state aid."
BT told the BBC: "It is up to the local council to decide who they work with on rural broadband. Having said that, a key consideration is that any network which benefits should be open to all ISPs to use. That way, local monopolies are avoided and customers have choice.
"BT has spent huge sums developing systems that support such competition and it may be the case that small local operators can’t meet those conditions and are therefore ineligible to receive public funds."
