Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
Edinburgh-based ISP and network builder GoFibre has secured a fourth contract under the UK government’s £5bn Project Gigabit scheme. The new deal is worth £105m (state aid) and will see them expand their gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to cover “around” 63,000 premises in hard-to-reach rural areas of North East Scotland.
Just to recap. The Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit programme is currently working to extend 1Gbps download speeds (200Mbps+ uploads) to reach “nationwide” coverage (c. 99%) by around 2032. As part of that, GoFibre has already secured three smaller ‘Local’ (Type A) deployment contracts for Teesdale (Lot 4.01), North Northumberland (Lot 34.01) in North England and the Scottish Borders and East Lothian (Scotland Lot 5) area.
The good news today is that they’ve now added a fourth state-aid supported deployment contract, albeit this time covering a much larger area of North East Scotland. But this is quite a large contract to be handing an operator of GoFibre’s size, and it will be interesting to see how well they handle it all. The roll-out itself will include parts of Aberdeen City, Aberdeenshire, Angus, Dundee, Highland, Moray and Perth and Kinross.
Just to be clear, this deployment contract is being targeted at premises that are not currently expected to be covered by gigabit broadband connectivity via either existing commercial projects or the Scottish Government’s own £600m Reaching 100% (R100) project with Openreach (BT).
At present, the roll-out plan for this new contract is still rather vague and subject to the usual pre-build engineering surveys, which often takes a few months to reach completion before the final build plan can be confirmed. But the following map does help to show clusters of all the “in scope” premises which were identified for contract procurement (tentative).
Customers of the new GoFibre service, once live over the next few years, can expect to pay from £22.50 per month for a 150Mbps (30Mbps upload) package on a 24-month term with an included wireless router, which rises to £33 for their top 1000Mbps (100Mbps upload) plan. The latter also comes with a bonus Wi-Fi extender (this can optionally be taken on other plans at extra cost).