Rural UK Broadband ISP Fibrus Name Top Locations for Working from Home

Alternative network ISP Fibrus, which is building a full fibre (FTTP) broadband network across parts of Northern Ireland and Cumbria (England), today claims to have drawn on a “robust set of measures” in order to name the top places to live as a remote worker in both of the aforementioned parts of the United Kingdom.

The provider, which covers over 465,000 UK homes with their network (more than 330,000 of those are in N.Ireland), says they examined broadband speed, house prices, access to shared and flexible workspaces, proximity to green spaces, and transport links to cities in order to produce separate Remote Working Indexes for both N.Ireland and Cumbria. But there’s no mention of other key categories, such as mobile network availability.

The north west-based town of Limavady came out on top for N.Ireland, boasting 95% “ultrafast broadband availability” (we’re not sure what definition they’ve used here) with favourable average house prices of £166,332. The town also ranked highly for green spaces with 52% of land within one mile allocated as green space, enabling lunch time, pre-or-post-work strolls for remote workers in the town.

As for Cumbria, Carlisle took the top spot, closely followed by Dalton-in-Furness and Cockermouth. Cockermouth ranked first overall for its availability of remote working spaces, while Dalton-in-Furness ranked top in the connectivity category, with 98% of residents having access to ultrafast broadband.

The top 10 best places to WFH in Northern Ireland are:

Limavady
Strabane
Banbridge
Newtownabbey
Dromore
Crumlin
Omagh
Ballymoney
Antrim
Randalstown

The top 10 best places to WFH in Cumbria are:

Carlisle
Dalton-in-Furness
Cockermouth
Brampton
Whitehaven
Wigton
Penrith
Barrow-in-Furness
Workington
Ulverston

Linda McMillan, Chief People Officer of Fibrus Group, said:

“Last year, we commissioned a Futurist to look at the potential of rural communities as engines for growth, and remote working was just one of the pillars of growth over the next 25 years.

We know anecdotally from our customers how much enhanced connectivity has already enabled people to return to their hometown without compromising career prospects, possibly to start a family or to set up their own business, but we were interested to see how Northern Ireland and Cumbria’s towns stacked up when it came to other factors that would create a really attractive proposition to a remote worker or someone who regularly ‘works from home’ – especially through the lens of someone considering a return to NI or Cumbria from further afield.”

Fibrus has published two Remote Working Index maps at the links below, although at the time of writing these weren’t yet live, and so we couldn’t see what sources they’d used for their various data points:

• Northern Ireland: https://fibrus.com/remote-working-index-northern-ireland-results
• Cumbria: https://fibrus.com/remote-working-index-cumbria