Friday Review: Going up the country

U.K. wholesale incumbent BT Openreach has a fight on its hands as of this week if it wants to secure government funding to develop rural broadband networks. Japanese tech giant Fujitsu on Wednesday pledged to invest between £1.5 billion and £2 billion – £500 million of which will come from the coalition government's Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) fund – to deploy a 1-Gbps fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network that will connect 5 million rural premises to high-speed broadband over the next three-to-five years. ISPs Virgin Media and TalkTalk have already agreed to buy access to Fujitsu's wholesale network in a bid to win high-speed Internet customers in remote areas of the country, which in turn promises to ramp up competition with BT Retail. Fujitsu describes its new network plan as &quot…