ZAPNET

In the farm country between Ostrów Wielkopolski and the Barycz valley, a two-partner general partnership from Odolanów has spent two decades building its own internet network — first radio, then fibre — while European money financed ever-cheaper glass all around it. ZAPNET's answer to a subsidy it could not outspend was to climb the same ladder itself, four times over, until the state's share of its village networks reached 85 percent. The grant registries, tariff sheets and regulator files price the whole manoeuvre — and show why, in subsidised Poland, a village operator's margin is set by decisions taken in Warsaw and Brussels rather than in Odolanów.