Wind Farm Grant Extends B4RN’s Barrasford FTTP Broadband Build

Community ISP B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North), which since 2011 has been working with volunteers to deploy a new 10Gbps full fibre (FTTP) network across rural parts of England, has secured a key grant of £66,000 from the Ray Wind Farm to help their network extend across more of the Barrasford area in Northumberland.

Just to recap. B4RN is a registered Community Benefit Society (i.e. they can’t be bought by a commercial operator and profits are distributed back into the community) that has already expanded their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to cover 25,000 premises (plus 13,000 customers) across various remote rural parts of Lancashire, Cheshire, Cumbria, Northumberland, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk and Yorkshire.

Meanwhile, the Ray Wind Farm, operated by Vattenfall, sits on the Ray Estate in Northumberland. It comprises 16 turbines generating 54.4 megawatts of electricity to the National Grid annually. Such farms are often accompanied by small grant schemes that put money back into nearby communities. The related Ray Wind Funds CIC raises £250,000 each year for such purposes and this year will see £66,000 of that going toward B4RN’s project in Barrasford (B4NTR).

The operator actually started building into the Barrasford area back in 2021, supported by a tiny amount of seed funding (£1,000) from the same fund to help promote the scheme. Additional funding also came from the government’s gigabit voucher scheme. But the initial network can only go so far and the new grant will enable B4RN to extend their build to reach to every property in the nearby parishes of Chollerton and Birtley.

According to the Hexham Courant, B4RN’s local subcontractors began work on the latest extension in October 2023 and have since laid over 31km of fibre duct across regions stretching from Chollerton through Barrasford and into Birtley Shields. B4RN separately notes that the number of properties requesting their service in the area is in excess of 250 so far, and rising.