MONTHLY ROUNDUP: THE JUNE THAT WAS

25 June 2025

“If you’d told me this time last year that in 12 months’ time I’d be watching my team laying kilometers of duct through the countryside, I’d have laughed in disbelief.” says Phil.

Welcome to our first monthly roundup for Rural Fibre Co.

This is meant to be an easy read, to keep you up-to-date with everything that’s happening. And boy, there’s a lot happening!

Who is Rural Fibre Co again?

We assume you’re reading this because you’ve got an interest in what we’re doing. But just as a reminder, Rural Fibre Co (RFC) is a new business started by Phillip Britt, co-founder and former Managing Director of Aussie Broadband and resident of Morwell.

We’re laying broadband fibre to under-served parts of rural and regional Gippsland, and we’re doing it completely in-house with a local team.

On the ground

After a lot of training on new Vermeer equipment, our team broke ground in mid-April to start building our network to our first destination, Hazelwood North.

The team has been making steady progress throughout May and June, with kilometres of duct now laid ready for fibre to be hauled through.

Laying duct is not as easy as it looks – particularly in the freezing cold of winter, and when the ground is dry after months of drought.

But the team is keen and doing a great job, laying not only ducts but also digging pits, installing pit lids, building cabinet sites and liaising with the local community as they go along. They’ve even been known to help local farmers with the odd cattle crossing.

We anticipate that our first test connections will take place in September/October, and we’ll start connecting Hazelwood North customers before the end of the year.

And then it will be onto the next location!

Network expansion and design

In May we announced our next 13 locations after Hazelwood North.

New towns on the network map include Churchilll, Cowwar, Glengarry, Hazelwood South, Longford, Morwell North, Rosedale, Toongabbie, Traralgon East, Traralgon North, Traralgon West, Tyers and Yinnar.

It looks like Traralgon West will be the next cab off the rank.

For those of you beyond Gippsland, please know we’ve seen your level of interest and we’ll keep you updated on further expansions.

Whilst we're rolling out our fibre, we also need an underlying network to ensure the best possible connection to the rest of the world.

We have team members working on systems, network design, engineering and testing to ensure we’re ready to go when our first customers are. For most of June our meeting room has been a tad cough unusable because we’ve been using it to test servers.

We’re also designing the connect experience, so that when you order a connection to our network, it runs as smoothly as possible. Part of the fun is that we can do this design from scratch – a chance that doesn’t come along very often.

Introducing Splice Internet

Whilst Rural Fibre Co is our main gig, we’ve also launched a side hustle, known as Splice Internet.

RFC is a wholesale broadband provider. To connect to its network, you need to talk to a retail broadband provider.

Splice Internet will be our own small retail service provider who can help you connect. We also expect other retail service providers will come on board to offer connections on the RFC network, so you will have a choice. Check it out at www.splice.au!

What’s important to us

In June, we also took a couple of days away from the tools for the whole team to work ON the business, rather than in the business.

As a small start-up, it was a great chance to get to know each other better and dig deep into what drives us, the roadblocks we’re facing, and what makes us, us.

We came away with a clear view of our values - dare to be different; play together, win together; everyone goes home; no bullshit; and get shit done.

We don’t expect these values just to live on the wall. For us they are like bumper bars in a bowling alley – they help guide our decisions, every day. They are a critical tool for our business.

And even more importantly, we spent time exploring our vision to close the digital divide in Gippsland and beyond, and what we need to do to get there.