Fibrus Issue Full Fibre Rollout Update for N.Ireland and England

Broadband ISP Fibrus has issued a progress update on both their commercial and state aid fuelled deployments of gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) networks across both Northern Ireland and the North of England. The operator’s medium-term goal is to deliver 500,000 premises by March 2024 and to enter Scotland.

Overall, the operator’s FTTP broadband rollout has, up to the end of September 2022, managed to cover a total of 190,000 premises (up from 120,000 in March 2022), and they still expect to hit their prior target of 250,000 premises by the end of this financial year (i.e. end of March 2023). But sadly, they haven’t provided a split of the current coverage figure between their different projects.

As part of all this, the operator said they remain “ahead of schedule” on their state aid supported Project Stratum (85,000 premises by March 2025) build in N.Ireland and have now delivered over 50% of the contracted premises (i.e. 46,000 premises passed).

In Northern Ireland, Fibrus is targeting a total build of 350,000 premises (inc. commercial), but plans to grow this with ‘infill’ projects in areas contiguous with its network. One such “infill” initiative is Project Halo, which will see them covering the smallest villages and settlements in NI supported by the UK Government’s Project Gigabit broadband voucher scheme.

In the North of England, they have a plan to cover 300,000 premises in “118 regional towns” across parts of Cumbria, Northumberland and North Yorkshire. But so far they’ve just committed £200m to reach an initial 113,000 premises by 2025 (here and here). It’s probably still a bit too early to gauge their progress on this project, but in any case, they haven’t provided a specific build update for it.

So far they’ve been focused on covering locations like Penrith and Kendal in Cumbria. Speaking of Penrith, the operator and its delivery partner, Viberoptix, have setup a new “strategic site” in the town that will enable both companies to co-ordinate their localised build in the North of England. This site will also act as a training school and provide fully serviced accommodation for employees and subcontractors.

However, Fibrus did reveal that they would soon announce their rollout plans for the North East in Northumberland and Durham (England). In terms of future plans across the UK, Fibrus has said its medium-term goal is to deliver 500,000 premises by March 2024 and to then look at expanding into Scotland. This will see the company developing a build engine that will deliver 250,000 premises per year, an output which it will maintain.

Conor Harrison, Chief Delivery Officer, said:

“Building networks at pace is a resource intensive business and our organisation is continuing to grow to meet the demands of our full fibre network roll out. We are expanding our operational capabilities in the new areas we are now operating, and we’re delighted with the quality of talent that are choosing to invest their careers in Fibrus.

We are completely focused on the task and continue to deliver all our programmes on time and within budget. Project Stratum as an example, is a highly challenging rural build, we are rolling out over 12km of network a day.

With this level of output and the continued growth of our build capacity, we are well placed to deliver over 1 million homes in the future, many of which will be the most rural and remote premises across the UK.”

Customers of Fibrus typically pay from £39.99 per month for an unlimited 150Mbps (50Mbps upload) package with an included router and free installation, which rises to £59.99 per month for their top 1000Mbps (300Mbps upload) tier on a 24-month contract term. Big discounts will often apply to these prices, but this varies between different parts of their build and is thus harder to summarise.