B4RN Celebrate as 800 Homes Get 1Gbps FTTH Broadband in Lancashire

The community built and funded B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North) project has announced that they’ve now connected 800 homes (up from 600 in November 2014) to their 1000Mbps (1 Gigabit per second) capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) broadband network in rural Lancashire (England).

According to Recombu, B4RN now expects to have 1,000 customers connected by Easter 2015 and over 2,000 by the end of 2015. This suggests a rather significant take-up since they’ve so far only planned to put the service within reach of a few thousand premises.

Figures from last year suggested that B4RN’s service costs approximately £1,000 per property to deploy (initially £750k was raised to fund this – between 2011 and 2012 – as part of the first share offer) and this is balanced against an average take-up of over 50% (note: some areas within its coverage are even said to have hit almost total uptake).

Going forward B4RN has lots of expansion plans and anticipates an eventual push into the edges of Cumbria and Yorkshire. The community invested approach that B4RN have taken means they’re also less concerned about BT’s own FTTP solution controversially using public money to encroach on their postcodes in locations like Dolphinholme.

Customers typically pay just £30 per month for the 1000Mbps service and there’s also a £150 one-off connection fee.