As UK operators face fines for failures to meet the Shared Rural Network (SRN) deadline, and 3G sunsetting programs diminish connectivity in rural areas, it is time to take the job of expanding rural coverage out of the hands of the national providers and put it into more agile, local operators. We are in another chapter in the great saga of the UK’s SRN. This week, the government said it has denied the request from three mobile operators – Three, Vodafone and Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) – to extend the deadline for the first phase of the SRN. The SRN is a government initiative to tackle poor coverage in rural areas. The first phase, the deadline of which is next…