ISP GoFibre Expands Aberdeenshire Rollout of FTTP Broadband
Rural focused ISP and network builder GoFibre (BorderLink), which is deploying a 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband service across the North of England and Scottish Borders area, has expanded their rollout in Aberdeenshire by starting to build across the small town of Laurencekirk.
Currently, more than 4,500 premises across Portlethen, Newtonhill and Stonehaven are already said to have been covered in Aberdeenshire and, once completed, the addition of Laurencekirk is expected to add another 1,600 premises (local homes and businesses) to the total.
The operator claims to have so far covered 50,000 premises (end of July 2023 – up from 35k in late May 2023) with their new full fibre network and, once the next phase of expansion is complete, their network should reach almost 120,000 premises in early 2024.
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Neil Conaghan, Chief Executive Officer at GoFibre, said:
“We are excited to share the news that our full fibre broadband network is now being rolled out in Laurencekirk, following remarkable progress and uptake across Portlethen, Newtonhill and Stonehaven.
This expansion marks a significant milestone in our efforts to bridge the digital divide in rural areas with our network already bringing remarkable speed improvements to residents and businesses, transforming their connectivity experience.
If you are a local resident or business owner interested in learning more about the advantages our network can offer, please get in touch to register your interest. We would like to thank everyone for their ongoing patience and support as we work to connect them to the benefits of full fibre technology.”
Standard pricing starts at £36 per month on a 24-month term for a 100Mbps package, which rises to £69 for 1000Mbps. We should point out that Openreach also has a small amount of FTTP coverage on the west side of the town.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Oh my! given their recent shambles in stonehaven and general poor reputation, I wonder how many suckers – sory, I mean customers – they’ll get from this one
Hopefully folk see just how shoddy this lot are and give them a miss
I live up the road from you in Portlethen but not the bit with Openreach FTTP.
Go installed on the day they would, cleaned up after themselves, bills all correct (discount applied correctly) and the speeds are what they should be.
Amazing how people in relatively close localities can have different experiences isn’t it?
Aberdeenshire is hardly northern England or the Borders, does one of the GoFibre directors live there?
Interestingly it looks like at companies house it shows that there is no one registered from Duns/Humbie as a director any longer. Also it seems one person/company (Gresham House (Nominees) Limited) holds 50-75% of the company shares but this wasn’t always the case as there is now ceased shareholders that had 25-50%, 2 from Pitlochry and 2 from Duns.
While I might be wrong on this but it maybe that its not in the original owners hands and its now a ‘Company’ rather than a personal interest business which is what I believe it started as due to dire lack of Telecom investment in the Lothian’s and the Border’s
@Meh that might be because the original management was so poor at managing the company that the finance house removed them. Not that the new management is doing much better.
GoFibre is certainly liking to shout about their excellent progress in frequent ISPReview articles but a quick look at their coverage suggests they are frequently targeting places where there is an already active OR FTTP build, and in some cases another Altnet. But with their prices generally being a bit higher than OR based providers how do they expect to gain and keep marketshare? It’ll just be a network with a small scattering of customers which doesn’t bode well (see Broadway if you wonder how that will turn out).
@Tj I’m not that surprised that they are charging a bit high as they can get away with it if they are first to an area with fibre. TBH I feel that OR and VM are slowing down deployment a lot these days and there seems to be less new deployments visible at least here in Scotland so I think GF have a bit time to anchor a reasonable user base.
This all said I think we are going to see a consolidation of the altnet fibre providers in the future just like what happened with the market that created VM. As usual the larger players will swallow the smaller ones to fill in holes in their own coverage or even just for the number of customers if they are in good volume.
Yes but they went into Cupar *after* it was covered by Openreach. Even if they had advanced plans they should have pulled out, that they didn’t given their current pricing shows very bad decision making by management.
I live in Berwick Upon Tweed, where GoFibre had its HQ until the buyout. 3+ yrs ago they hinted at fibre coming soon. Today Openreach has live FTTP service across much of the town and is finishing the build out. In the past couple of weeks I’ve seen GoFibre workers at Openreach ducts, evidently starting to do something in the town. Baffling and a missed opportunity for them. Many houses in my street have already taken up the Openreach offer and I can’t see many of those who haven’t taking up the more expensive GoFibre offer.