Broadband Provider GoFibre Named One of Scotland’s Fastest Growing Companies
Edinburgh-based UK alternative network GoFibre, which is rolling out a gigabit broadband (FTTP) network across remote rural parts of Scotland and Northern England, has been named as one of the top 50 fastest-growing businesses in Scotland by the UK Fast Growth Index for 2025.
The Index identifies the fifty fastest-growing companies in seven regions and nations namely London, the Midlands and the East of England, the North of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, South of England and Wales. All the firms on the list have been entered for the 2025 UK Fast Growth Awards, due to be held in London on November 26th where the winners will be recognised as the fastest growing in their sectors and their regions.
The operator currently expects to deploy their new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband network to reach a footprint of 250,000 premises “in the next 3 years“, which has recently been boosted by several major Project Gigabit contracts with the government. At the end of last year the operator also had a total of 10,597 customers.
Advertisement
Neil Conaghan, CEO of GoFibre, said:
“Being named among Scotland’s fastest-growing companies is an incredible honour and achievement for GoFibre. As a company we’ve demonstrated strong commercial success, not just in the context of the independent broadband provider sector, but as a Scottish company generally.
Our growth has been built on our ambitious, people-friendly culture – adding customers while retaining our hyper-local, customer-centred approach, demonstrated for instance by our industry-leading Trustpilot score. I’m so proud of all that GoFibre has achieved since our founding in the Borders in 2017 and look forward to continued growth while retaining what makes GoFibre unique.”
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.
Three UK Discounts Unlimited 4G and 5G Home Broadband to £16 »
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message and display names can be almost anything you like (provided they do not contain offensive language or impersonate a real persons legal name). By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
Fast growing in what way? They’ve borrowed around £300m – which is around 100x their turnover. They make a massive operational loss and can only service their debt using more borrowing. It looks next to impossible for them to survive given their poor take-up and competition (60% overbuilt). 10k customers paying circa £25/month doesn’t add up to very much when your owe so much money. Madness.
In the 14 months since they went live on the pole that serves my house they have a 28% take up rate, which is not too shabby if you ask me. No overbuild here the only full fibre option going.
They’re backed by the Scottish government, and also private equity.
Growth needs finance and it’s normal to get external resources for scaling.
Given the growth and gap in the market I’d say by 2028 they’d be worth more than the debt.
Subtle changes of wording, change debt to investment, it gives clearer perspective.
We’re Go Fibre customers and have been blown away by how good it actually is. For years we were told it’s our fault, the routers too close to the cat, and we paid the same as houses getting 5x the speed. Now, in a connected world, our business can scale and grow, we’re no longer tied to local resources only.
In a rural area and remote location, being connected to high speed weather proof broadband changes everything
GoFibre has hardly any build. They spend a lot of money building to a cherry-picked number of houses and seem to have no real expansion plans, other than more cherry-picked houses, which is likely to lead people into expensive broadband packages from a single supplier. I expect GoFibre to be one of the likeliest targets for M&A by another bigger player in the future tbh, as their plans just don’t really stack up.
They did the whole of my village sans a single MDUs that is sheltered accommodation. So were you get the cherry picking notion I have not the foggiest. The stinging bit is the £5 a month it costs to get out of CGNAT and get a static IPv4 address, and find you still get a dynamic IPv6 address. However given they are my only full fibre option and take up rate on my pole is just shy of 30% they seem to be doing alright.
The plan is to meet Scottish government targets for rural and coastal towns which traditionally paid a lot but got very little. Businesses need this faster more stable connection, and saving money is a bonus.
They’re priorities are the fiber deprived towns and villages along the east coast, those who weren’t viewed as lucrative by the big two.
I’m a Go Fibre customer, I’ll tell you now it’s the best service and broadband I’ve ever had.
Sounds good, not that you’d know it from the comments here
We’re with Go Fibre and like another post above, they’re the only provider for full fibre where I live. Openreach have no plans to upgrade us. They don’t seem to cherry pick homes either. In Northumberland, under the Project Gigabit contract they were given a list of which communities and remote homes were to be covered at the cost of the public purse, my house being one of them. We were unviable, otherwise