rural areas generally face higher costs of service because they have less dense networks meaning that more infrastructures needs to be built and operated to serve the same number of people other factors affecting the cost of service include the quality of the water source and thus the cost of treating the raw water to obtain drinkable quality the type of technology applied and additional service elements such as the level of water quality monitoring or the quality of customer service in some cases the organization of the sector can be a major factor in determining the cost of service provision fragmentation of service provision in rural areas among a large number of small services providers prevents achieving economies of scale and results in higher average cost of service provision