The Voice of rural Spain

For the second consecutive year, Redes&Telecom has organised a forum on the local operator and its decisive role in connecting those unpopulated and underserved areas of our country. Last June we shared with Adamo, Alea Soluciones, Cambium Networks and Grupo Aire different perspectives on the needs of the customer in rural Spain.

Achieving full connectivity in rural Spain is an objective set by the Government and in which all players in the telco sector are involved, but it has been the smaller companies that continue to address these rural areas of the territory.
Today, local and regional operators are facing major challenges and are calling for collaboration between different actors, including the public administration. In their favour, as always, is their proximity to the customer.
Did you know that in Spain there are 3,500 local and regional operators? Of which 1,786 are network operators and 1,023 have only a local scope.
In our journey and commitment to local and regional operators, we have learned that growth must go hand in hand:

• Providing value and space to the local operator so that they do not lose contact with their customer and continue to be responsible for the last mile, for the installation at the customer’s home because that is their gateway and often the first and only direct contact they have with them.
• Continue to explore other service and business models. It is not enough just to offer bitstream.
• Improve the experience perceived by the end customer, as it depends on many factors and not all of them are related to the service delivered by the operator.

We propose a flexible solution specifically designed for local operators: We have a proprietary systems platform with access to the entire footprint with a single connection and delivery of all traffic to a single point of interconnection. So by connecting at a single point the operator has access in a short period of time to the more than 2 million homes we have in our network.

On the operator’s side, we make them maintain the direct relationship with their end customer by providing them with the best experience. The operator is the one who manages the resources and activates the services and the one who provisions the fibre in the last mile and installs the equipment in the customer’s home. In this way, it never loses control or ownership of the customer.

In addition, we accompany them commercially so that they have support from us to be able to grow in our footprint. There are local operators who are very present in their home towns with their own network or those of third parties and want to expand to other areas outside their area of influence and need help with the installations, or to present themselves commercially to the population. Our idea is to go hand in hand with them and be able to carry out joint actions such as telesales campaigns, special promotions at specific times for the end customer, joint marketing campaigns, in-store actions.

We have a duality in our network between urban and rural. Half of our network, one million homes, is outside the big cities, for example, we have connected more than 300 municipalities of less than 5,000 inhabitants and our objective in all of them is to bring operators through our network to the end population so that their inhabitants have more options in terms of supply, that is, to broaden the range so that they are not captive to just one or two operators. Our commitment is to continue growing in rural footprint with a target in our strategic plan to reach 5 million homes passed by fibre.
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