B4RN Celebrates 10 Years of Bringing FTTP Broadband to Rural Areas

Community ISP B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North), which are deploying a 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across rural premises in England, has today marked the 10th anniversary of their share launch. The network currently covers around 20,000 premises and has connected 9,000 of those.

B4RN is somewhat of a rarity in the UK ISP world as they’re a registered Community Benefit Society (i.e. the provider can’t be bought by a commercial operator and profits are distributed back into the community). The provider first began deploying “full fibre” services to remote rural homes in Lancashire during 2012 (the ‘share’ offer launched a year prior to that) and they’ve since expanded across parts of Cheshire, Cumbria, Northumberland, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk and Yorkshire.

Originally, the majority of their network was funded by communities investing in the company through shares, and many of those did that while also helping to physically build the new fibre infrastructure (volunteers on soft digs through fields etc.). But more recently they’ve also been harnessing millions of pounds worth of gigabit vouchers and community investment loans, which has enabled them to build faster and establish their own engineers.

Unlike many other full fibre networks, B4RN offers 100% of properties in a community an FTTP connection, “no matter how hard they are to reach, and with no additional cost passed on to the individual.”

Barry Forde, B4RN’s Former CEO, said:

“Remember back in those days, people weren’t doing this sort of stuff. They were doing very traditional dig up the road type models or sling up telegraph poles. So the way we were looking at doing it was fairly radically different. But the reason for doing that was to get the cost into something that we thought was going to be affordable. That was a lot of work to come up with that design and there was a lot of challenge in presenting it in a way that people would not take one look at it and say we’re ‘yogurt knitters’.

It had to be a credible technical design. And although on the one hand we had people like BT saying amateurs can’t build a network, on the other hand, nobody could actually come up with anything that was fundamentally wrong with the design, so that was very important.”

The operator has put a nice little article up today that looks back on those early years, which is worth a read (here).