GoFibre Win North Northumberland Gigabit Broadband Rollout Contract

The third Local Supplier contract under the UK Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout scheme – worth £7.3m – has today been awarded to rural ISP GoFibre (BorderLink), which will upgrade broadband for more than 3,750 hard-to-reach premises across North Northumberland (England).

Project Gigabit aims to extend 1Gbps capable (download speeds) networks to reach at least 85% of UK premises by the end of 2025, before hopefully achieving “nationwide” coverage (c. 99%) by around 2030 (here). Commercial investment is expected to deliver around 80% of this, which leaves the government’s scheme to focus on tackling the final 20% (mostly rural and some sub-urban areas), where the private sector alone would otherwise struggle.

The project uses a number of different approaches to tackle the problem (e.g. vouches and investment in dark fibre builds), but the largest part of the scheme involves a gap-funded subsidy approach – the Gigabit Infrastructure Subsidy (GIS) programme. This is where smaller local and larger regional contracts are awarded to network operators and ISPs who can help to build their gigabit-capable infrastructure across the final 20%.

The Building Digital UK (BDUK) team, which manages Project Gigabit, awarded their first GIS contract to Wessex Internet for North Dorset (Lot 14.01) in August 2022 (here), which was followed by GoFibre picking up the contract for Teesdale (Lot 4.01) in September 2022 (here) and they’ve today also scooped the contract for North Northumberland (Lot 34.01).

The North Northumberland project will cover towns, villages and hamlets across the area including premises near to Berwick-upon-Tweed and Wooler, subject to further survey completion. The contract has been signed and planning is now underway, with construction due to begin in Spring 2023.

Sam Calvert, Chief Revenue Officer at GoFibre, said:

“At GoFibre, everything we do is guided by our mission to support the development and prosperity of local communities across Northern England and Scotland with high-quality broadband services. We’re delighted to have been awarded our second contract as a trusted partner under the government’s Project Gigabit scheme with today’s announcement providing an exciting opportunity for us to extend our services to the people of North Northumberland.

Having already embedded ourselves within the Berwick community, we’re strengthening our ties with North Northumberland by helping locals to connect with each other and thrive, thanks to a reliable broadband connection. This opens up opportunities for economic growth, education and employment with everybody deserving access to world class connectivity which we’re looking forward to bringing to North Northumberland.”

Julia Lopez, Digital Infrastructure Minister, said:

“North Northumberland will be one of the first places to benefit from this government’s multi-million pound investments to bring people in hard-to-reach areas the broadband speeds they deserve.

Faster gigabit broadband will mean families no longer have to battle over bandwidth and people in rural areas will get the speed, reliability and freedom to live and work flexibly.”

GoFibre recently secured a significant investment of £164m from Gresham House (BSIF) to build their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across 500,000 premises in the North of England and Scottish Borders over the next 3-years – by around the end of 2025 (here), which the new contract will clearly help – a little – to achieve. The fact that GoFibre has won two of these contracts, even if they are only smaller projects, is still significant.

Customers of the new service can expect to pay from £36 per month for a 100Mbps package on a 24-month term with an included wireless router, which rises to £69 per month for their top 1000Mbps plan. The latter also comes with a bonus Wi-Fi extender (this can optionally be taken on other plans for just £5 per month extra).

However, it’s worth pointing out that GoFibre’s availability checker on their website is somewhat unreliable, since it claims that their network is available in many areas where it hasn’t even been built yet. Take with a pinch of salt. But we understand that GoFibre are currently working to update their checker in order to be more accurate.