B4RN Set to Hit 5000 Rural UK FTTH Broadband Connections Target

Plucky rural ISP B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North), which has spent the past 6 years deploying a 1Gbps capable community built and funded “full fibre” (FTTH) broadband network to remote homes in several counties across England, looks set to hit their 5,000 connections target by around the end of this month.

The Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network remains a wonderful success story, not least due to the way in which they’ve encouraged volunteers in each area to help build the network (usually in exchange for shares instead of cash). The model also relies on local landowners (e.g. farmers) being generous and agreeing to waive their right to payment under a wayleave (access) agreement, which enables the fibre to be affordably dug through their land.

B4RN is also registered as a community benefit society, which among other things means that it can never be bought by a commercial operator and their profits will only ever be distributed back into the community. Suffice to say that the bigger they get, the further and faster they can go and this is certainly holding true today.

The unique operator first broke ground in March 2012 and initially only focused on building out their core network in rural Lancashire’s Lower Lune Valley area, but they’ve since expanded or are in the process of expanding into rural parts of Cheshire, Cumbria, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk and Yorkshire.

Just to give a rough idea of progress, B4RN has gone from having around 1,000 live connections (i.e. properties actually connected to their network and using the service) in 2015 to 4,836 today and their current run rate is about 150 per month. In other words, they’re roughly on course to achieve the current target of 5,000 connections during summer 2018 (this was set last year).

Barry Ford, B4RN’s CEO, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“The score on the door as of this evening is 4836 connected properties leaving us to find 164 connections to reach 5000. Our run rate is about 150 per month which suggests that we will hit the 5000 figure about the end of this month or early next month.

We have kicked off a number of new builds over the last few weeks so we should start seeing an uplift in the connection rate in a month or so, hoping to hit 300/month sometime next year.”

Naturally B4RN’s approach also encourages a strong degree of community engagement (i.e. getting locals to help build their own fibre), which tends to create impressively high levels of take-up in a very short space of time (65% was the last average we saw). This has also helped them to overcome several overbuild challenges from Openreach (BT) and intransigence from the odd council.

One other significant advantage of B4RN’s model is that customers benefit from one of both the cheapest and fastest broadband connections in the UK. Even after six years subscribers still pay just £30 inc. VAT per month for a 1000Mbps (symmetrical) unlimited service (annual price hikes? Nope, they’ve never heard of such a thing) and there’s also a one-off connection fee of £150. Cheap when you consider that it’s FTTH.

Admittedly B4RN’s model only works best in rural “soft dig” areas, where you don’t have to worry about the tighter restrictions and higher costs that can occur in more urban locations due to the need to dig up streets etc. However, they have had to do a bit of that too in some of the more “urban” villages, such as Halton (Halton-with-Aughton) in Lancashire.

Not that rural deployments are somehow easy-peasy. Try suggesting that to those volunteers who’ve had to cut through boggy fields or deal with the joys of heavy snowfall earlier this year. It’s not always fun, but there is usually cake! Nevertheless B4RN continues to meet and overcome all the challenges that it’s faced. Today the operator is also home to 26 staff (including Directors) and they’re still looking to hire more.

Check out B4RN’s Coverage Page to see where they’re going next.