The opponents of business rates on fibre must feel like Sisyphus – the mythological Greek figure compelled to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and condemned to repeat this exercise throughout eternity.
I understand that business rates became an issue for the telecoms industry after the 2000 Revaluation, when the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) decided to change the basis of assessment, by rating each lit strand of fibre. Suddenly, lighting an additional fibre incurred significant additional cost; the previous basis of assessment had been the “constructors test”, which was independent of the number of fibres in use.
The Netherlands may be one of Europe’s leading broadband nations, but it’s suffering from a familiar problem – the actual broadband speeds received by consumers are significantly lower than advertised. A study carried out by Telecompaper in partnership with iPing shows that Dutch subscribers currently receive about 60 percent of the average advertised broadband speeds.