'I went weak at the knees when I read the Ministry's reply,' Andrzej Banach, owner of Net-Komp, a small IT company based in Kolno in north-eastern Poland, tells Gazeta. When applications for EU aid started in December 2008, Banach applied too - he wanted to provide internet access to 64 villages and towns, covering virtually the whole county.
Funds from the EU programme, a total of 200 million, are earmarked on fighting the digital exclusion, that is, civilisational backwardness resulting from lack of access to modern information technologies.
The programme would provide funds for local operators to develop networks in areas where otherwise it would be unviable from the business point of view, providing residents with relatively fast, in Poland at least, 2 Mb/s connections.
An essential requirement is that the projects must be carried out in places that currently have no internet access at all.
Mr Banach calculated that the subsidy would help him to achieve breakeven within just one year. And then the reply came: 'We are sorry to inform you that none of the locations mentioned qualifies for subsidies.'
Maps the Ministry of Internal Affairs (
MSWiA) uses in reviewing the applications showed that all of the places Mr Banach planned to connect already had broadband internet access.
'I know these villages very well. Many barely have 2G mobile coverage, in some people don't even have fixed-line phones.'
Wielkopolska also looks well on the maps. Mr Banach's friend, an internet provider too, wrote him, 'They told us at the provincial office that we had no chance for funding because "everything is already here."' The man let it go and didn't even apply.
It is a similar case in Małopolska - the official maps show over 90 percent of the province within broadband coverage, even though the provincial office has long alarmed that over 300,000 households in the region risked digital exclusion.
World-Scale Phenomenon In reality, Poland lags behind most European countries in all available rankings of broadband internet access.
'Two hundred million euros,' sighs Daniel Kulesza, owner of Netlog, an ISP in the Pomorskie province. 'With such funds we could quickly do away with digital exclusion in many areas,' he says confidently.
If it were not for the maps. Which, ironically, were created so that ISPs did not try to cheat officials by applying for subsidies to profitable existing projects.
Why are the maps so impossibly optimistic?
The Interior Ministry explains that it wanted to save and used maps made by a company called ITTI for the purpose of far larger projects - broadband regional networks. There, small inaccuracies were less noticeable but in micro scale they became evident instantly.
'Collecting data for the maps, their authors assumed that each of our base stations has identical coverage,' explains Łukasz Jop at iNet Group in Silesia.
As a result, even base stations with a coverage of 2 km, and that in one direction only, are shown as having a coverage of 8 km.
'No one took into account whether the area was hilly or wooded. As if Poland suddenly became perfectly flat and empty,' Mr Jop says ironically.
Even the large operators' coverage figures, as Electronic Communication Office (UKE) head Anna Streżyńska told Gazeta last week, are usually too optimistic.
'After all, everyone wants to present himself in best light. So an operator shows they have coverage in a certain place. But then it turns out that the base station's view has been blocked by a tall building and the signal doesn't reach everywhere,' Ms Streżyńska said.
The Interior Ministry is aware of the problem, which was also reported about recently by the daily Gazeta Prawna. Wioletta Paprocka, spokesperson for the MSWiA, says the ministry is conducting 'intense consultations' on the issue. And it is rewriting the project eligibility requirements, perhaps it will dump the maps at all. But only from June.
Why? Because the terms cannot be changed when the application process is in progress, they explain at the MSWiA.
The start of the project was already postponed once, last year, from May to December.
'I was sure that in November I'd be with an excavator on the site,' says Michał Matuszewski from Gryfice in north-western Poland. He received a loan promise in early 2008, but it has now expired. Meanwhile, the financial crisis has caused banks to tighten their lending policies, and in Zachodniopomorskie the application process hasn't even started. It is just as well that because of the MSWiA's faulty maps the applications are now to be reviewed as they are submitted, and in the communal office rather than in Warsaw.
By end-January, operators had applied for over PLN9 million in subsidies. The Interior Ministry doesn't say however how many applications have been rejected.
'And I recently read in a newspaper that small companies are poor at absorbing EU aid,' says Mr Kulesza.
Translated by Marcin Wawrzyńczak
