B4RN Buy Capacity for its FTTH Lancashire Rural Broadband Network from GEO

The £1.86m B4RN (Broadband 4 Rural North) scheme has moved another step closer to launching its community-built and ultra-fast 1Gbps fibre optic broadband (FTTH) service, which will reach several villages across rural north Lancashire UK, after it signed a crucial capacity deal with Geo Networks (GEO).

As a result B4RN will be able to link its platform into GEO’s dark fibre network, which connects to a national peering centre at Manchester Telecity. That should be enough to give B4RN all the capacity it needs to serve its target of 2,500 properties across 350 square kms in Lancashire.

Barry Forde, CEO of B4RN, said:

“To ensure this project is viable we have to provide high bandwidth internet. In order to make this happen in a rural area we recognised that we needed to lease dark fibre. We did look at options from other providers but they aren’t viable for us as they can’t provide flexible capacity at a cost effective price.

We chose Geo because it runs a first class, open-access network with an excellent reliability record. Leasing its fibre enables us to operate at a carrier level to bring superfast internet speeds to those in the remotest of areas. This will make a real difference to people’s quality of life.”

Chris Smedley, CEO of Geo, said:

“This is an extremely exciting project which will see some of the remotest parts of the UK enjoying broadband speeds unrivalled to most of the world’s leading business cities. Leasing Geo’s dark fibre is a genuine, future-proof investment decision for the community, which will benefit from reliable and flexible high-capacity services. As such, we are ideally placed to support this community project and we are looking forward to the network going live.”

Earlier this week we reported that B4RN was already nearing completion of Phase 1, which has cost around £364,000 and aims to connect 983 premises along 26 routes that involves the digging of 182,086 metres of trench (here). After today’s news it now looks almost certain that the first connections will go live in August 2012.