Town of St Helens Start £2.5m Project to Build Full Fibre Network

The local authority for the Merseyside (England) town of St Helens, which is home to a population of around 103,000, has notified ISPreview of a new digital infrastructure project that aims to invest £2.5m to deploy a fibre optic network to support businesses across the town centre with gigabit-capable broadband.

At present, most of St Helens is already well covered by gigabit-capable broadband networks from both Virgin Media (VMO2) and Openreach (BT), while Grain covers much of the Newtown area. CityFibre have also been deploying in the town since 2022 (here), but it’s unclear how much progress they’ve made, as the network doesn’t seem to have gone live yet (there’s currently only minimal build activity).

The big problem is that the aforementioned builds have left a sizeable chunk unserved around the centre of the town, where many businesses, shops and stadiums tend to reside. The council is now planning to resolve this by harnessing a £2.5m public investment.

The new St Helens Council Digital Infrastructure Project aims to deliver “high quality fibre connections to support businesses across St Helens town centre” (this will be a gigabit-capable network). The network may also help to fuel capacity for faster 5G mobile networks and free Wi-Fi for local communities.

Councillor Richard McCauley, Cabinet Member for Regeneration and Planning, said:

“This Town Deal project is a key part of our transformational work to develop St Helens town centre and will prove a real boost to businesses, residents and visitors and will help enable better support for things like 5G connectivity in the borough in the future. This scheme will also provide digital infrastructure pulling together the other Town Deal project sites across St Helens town centre.”

The next steps will see the Council seek interest from the Market by running a tender process to appoint a delivery partner with the aim to have works starting during the autumn of this year and completing late 2025. But in our experience it’s not uncommon for such projects to take a bit longer than expected to reach completion (i.e. take these dates as being very tentative).

The Supplier, once selected, will then take responsibility for owning, operating and maintaining the digital network and connecting end-user customers to the fibre gigabit offer. The Council will be holding a Pre-tender engagement session to explain what is required and the procurement process it will follow; between 14:00 to 15:30 on 27th March for interested parties.

Interested parties can register here for more (due to go live sometime later today) or suppliers may prefer to contact the team at digitalinfrastructureproject@sthelens.gov.uk for further information.