First UK Project Gigabit Broadband Contract Completes in North Northumberland

The UK Government have this morning confirmed that GoFibre has become the first network operator to complete one of their subsidised roll-out contracts under the £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout scheme. The announcement relates to GoFibre‘s £7.3m (state aid) contract to deploy a full fibre (FTTP) network across 3,750 hard-to-reach premises in North Northumberland.

The smaller Type A (Local) contract for North Northumberland (Lot 34.01) was originally announced in October 2022 (here) and construction finally got underway the following Spring. GoFibre has since installed 415 kilometres of new fibre optical cable to dozens of rural communities in north Northumberland, from Seahouses to Wooler, covering “over” 3,800 premises.

Over 300 businesses in the region – including factories, farms, pubs, and even wedding venues – can now also access the same network. GoFibre also offered a number of free connections to important community facilities in the region (e.g. Harbottle Village Hall, East Ord Village Hall and Lucker Village Hall).

Neil Conaghan, CEO of GoFibre, said:

“On behalf of the outstanding team at GoFibre, I’m tremendously proud that not only is GoFibre the first provider to have successfully completed the build for a Project Gigabit contract in the UK, but we’ve done it an incredible four months ahead of schedule.

This means that thousands of homes and businesses across North Northumberland, including in underserved and rural areas, can now get access to the very fastest full fibre broadband available on the GoFibre network, with all the benefits that brings.

The GoFibre team have brought expertise and hard work to ensure quality project delivery, and most importantly the collaboration with everyone from government, to the local authority, public bodies and the local community have ensured we’ve completed this project, swiftly, smoothly and effectively. Our significant base in Berwick-upon-Tweed, where our industry-leading customer service team is based, has also been a real enabler for delivery.”

DSIT Minister, Ian Murray, said:

“We committed to end the digital postcode lottery, and today’s milestone in Northumberland shows we’re not just making promises – we’re keeping them.

Whether you’re streaming your favourite show or running a business from the kitchen table, lightning-fast broadband means no more buffering and more getting on with your day.”

At present around 88% of UK premises can already access a gigabit-capable network (here) and Ofcom separately forecasts that this could hit c.97% by May 2027 (here). But most of this has been delivered by commercial deployments (predominantly focused on urban and semi-urban areas), yet there are some areas in the final 10-20% of premises that are simply too expensive for commercial providers to tackle, which is what Project Gigabit exists to tackle.

Project Gigabit itself was originally established in 2021 to help extend broadband ISP networks capable of delivering download speeds of at least 1000Mbps (1Gbps), and uploads of at least 200Mbps, to achieve “nationwide” coverage (c.99%) by 2030 2032 (here). The completion of the first subsidy scheme contract under the above programme is thus an important development, even if it was one of their smallest deals.

According to the latest independent data from Thinkbroadband, some 90.3% of premises in North Northumberland now have access to a gigabit-capable broadband connection (98% if only looking at 30Mbps+ speeds), which of course means that there’s still some work left to do. But tackling the final 10% is likely to be significantly more expensive.