FACTCO Extends Gigabit Broadband to Village of Darras Hall

Liverpool-based network builder and UK ISP FACTCO has today confirmed that their new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network has completed another rollout, this time for more than 450 properties in the Northumberland (England) village of Darras Hall.

Unlike some of FACTCO’s prior builds, which tended to be fully or part funded by the Government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS), the deployment at Darras Hall has been fully funded by FACTCO itself. The work itself took about 8-months and involved some co-operation with the iNorthumberland team at Northumberland County Council (NCC).

Customers can normally expect to pay from £24.99 per month for a 100Mbps service on a 24-month term, which includes a free router and installation, while the top 1000Mbps package is just £44.99 per month.

Mr Charles Laidlaw, Local Resident, said:

“The speeds I had before were just shocking to be honest, it kept dropping out which was always embarrassing during Teams meetings when working from home. The connection we have now with FACTCO is chalk and cheese, we were only getting about 30 Mbps for download and half that for upload, now we’re averaging at 300 Mbps. The guys who came to install it did a great job, they even worked in the rain!”

FACTCO added that they’re now looking to investigate further developing the network in Darras Hall, although they don’t specify precisely what that could mean. As a side note, the press release describes Darras Hall as a village, although Google references it as an upland housing estate located in the village of Ponteland.