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In recent years, Reggefiber has rolled out fibre optic in a large number of areas in the Netherlands. Particularly the cores in somewhat smaller municipalities turned out to be an interesting area for Reggefiber. Households in these cores now have the choice between fairly fast DSL and very fast cable and fibre optic connections. At the moment, this concerns over half a million households that have access to fibre optic.
However, this fibre optic rollout also has a downside. The gap (digital divide) between these cores and the rural areas has become even larger. While the residents of the cores have the choice between three fast infrastructures, residents of the rural areas can only use slow DSL connections. As the demand for bandwidth is expected to steadily grow by 30 to 40 percent annually in the coming years, but DSL in the rural areas is hardly getting any faster, the issues here are becoming increasingly bigger. Broadband in rural areas has therefore become an increasingly important societal issue in recent years.
In Horst aan de Maas, the cores have been equipped with fibre optic for quite some time. However, the rural areas here also lag behind. On 10 September, the municipal council in Horst aan de Maas discussed this topic after a working group had collected 1,250 signatures. They urged an investigation into the possibility of providing all addresses in the municipality with a broadband connection. Dialogic will conduct the research in the autumn of 2014.
