IT support and business broadband in Colne

Distance

About 7 miles from our Burnley office

Typical drive

about 15 minutes

Main route

M65 to J14

Postcode areas

BB8

Dialling code

01282 Shared with Burnley, Nelson and Padiham

County

Lancashire

A border town, commercially as well as geographically

Colne is where the motorway stops. The M65 ends at junction 14 and the A56 carries on over the tops towards Skipton and the Yorkshire Dales, which has two consequences worth understanding if you run a business here.

The first is that Colne functions as a genuine crossroads: it draws trade from Pendle, from the Craven side of the border and from tourist traffic heading into the Dales and the Brontë country. That supports a stronger-than-average retail, food and hospitality sector - a busy independent high street, pubs and guesthouses, and one of the North West's largest out-of-town retail draws at Boundary Mill on the edge of town. The town's annual blues festival brings a substantial visitor spike into a small centre.

The second is that Colne is the last well-connected place before things get rural fast. Two miles out of town and you are in an entirely different infrastructure conversation.

Seasonal businesses need different phones and different broadband

If a large share of your revenue arrives in bursts - festival weekends, school holidays, Christmas trade - the technology decisions that look sensible on an annual average are usually wrong.

• Phone capacity should flex. A traditional multi-line system is sized for your worst day and paid for every day. A hosted phone system lets you add users, add call capacity, put an out-of-hours message on and route overflow to a mobile, then scale back down. For a guesthouse or a restaurant that is the whole argument.
• Card payments cannot be the weak link. A broadband outage during a quiet Tuesday is an annoyance. The same outage on a festival Saturday is a genuinely bad day. If you take a meaningful share of your takings on card, a 4G failover that costs a few pounds a month is not a luxury.
• Wi-Fi for customers should be separate from Wi-Fi for the till. This is basic and frequently not done. Guest traffic and business systems on the same flat network is how a compromised laptop in a bedroom becomes your problem.

Where Colne's connectivity gets interesting

In the town itself the picture is reasonable and improving, with full fibre available at many addresses and SoGEA available at most of the rest. The interesting part is the fringe.

Head out to Trawden, Winewall, Laneshaw Bridge or up the moor road and the copper gets longer, the cabinets get further away and the economics of a commercial fibre build stop working. Businesses in those places - farm diversifications, holiday lets, small workshops, equestrian and outdoor operators - regularly get told "no fibre" and left there.

We would rather give you the full list of options, which usually includes some combination of:

• A SoGEA or FTTC service if the line length allows something usable.
• A 4G or 5G fixed-wireless service, which on an exposed Pennine site with a decent mast line-of-sight can comfortably beat a long copper run.
• Bonded or failover arrangements, combining two mediocre connections into one that is dependable.
• Community fibre schemes and Openreach demand-led builds, which are genuinely worth investigating in this part of Lancashire and which we will point you at even though there is nothing in it for us.

Mobile coverage on the moor roads towards Yorkshire varies a lot by network. If your people drive them daily, that should decide your business mobile provider - see business mobile coverage for how to test it properly rather than trusting a map.

Old buildings, old lines, hard deadline

Colne's building stock is largely Victorian, and Victorian buildings collect phone lines. In pubs and guesthouses in particular we routinely find an analogue line for the payphone that has not taken a coin in years, one for a fire panel, one for a card terminal, one for the alarm, and one that nobody can account for at all but which is still being billed.

All of it stops on 31 January 2027. The cost saving from clearing out lines you no longer need often covers a good chunk of the replacement system, which makes the audit worth doing on financial grounds alone. Start with the switch-off deadline guide and then the replacement options.