Border Fibre aka GoFibre

I live in North Berwick, East Lothian in SE Scotland. A company called GoFibre is currently pulling fibre cable throughout North Berwick and is actively seeking new customers. They are an offshoot of BorderLink, which is a microwave broadband provider that has been operating for about 5 years in the northeastern Borders area of Scotland. I can't find any mention of GoFibre on ThinkBroadband and would like to know if anyone has heard of them, their reputation, etc. Their pricing is attractive, the service is close to symmetrical, and they anticipate commencing service in early 2022. Thanks in advance for your help.

Edited by Lownote (Mon 04-Oct-21 14:07:56)

An addendum to my posting yesterday. Website is GoFibre.com. Unfortunately their home service is NOT even close to symmetrical, and the only level of their Business service that is symmetrical is the 1 gig download speed that is also 1 gig up. However, with a price of £575 per month, this is out of the questions except for huge businesses that need this much bandwidth. There is also a 2 down/2 up level. I've written them to see if it would be possible to get symmetrical business service of between 100 mbps and 300 mbps. The lack of symmetrical service is most disappointing. Unless they can put some sort of custom package together, I'm going to pass even though they have pulled fibre in front of my house.

Well, apparently the website is up for sale!

The website is actually www.GoFibre.co.uk

In reply to a post by Lownote:

I'm going to pass even though they have pulled fibre in front of my house.

Out of interest, what service are you going to stick with instead? Do you have an existing asymmetric ultrafast option?

Some news in the press today about them...

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/10/border...

In answer to the earlier posting that I just now saw, I’m currently getting FTTC from Gamma which is giving me about 60 down and 10 up. It’s not great speed but has been very dependable. I also appreciate the flag on their press release announcing their plans which are consistent with what I’m seeing here in East Lothian. The trucks have been out on our street installing fibre for the last couple of weeks. While my current speed is not great, I know that the secret really lies with upload speed that is either symmetrical or more symmetrical than what they have on offer at a reasonable price. I have had some back and forth email with their sales and marketing folks, although they have not replied to my request for a custom package of either 100 up/down or 200 up/down. If either were offered, again for a monthly price in 2 digits, I’d make the switch immediately. Cheers.

I've not got any experience of their fibre product, but they've been selling wireless broadband around here for a while (Eyemouth area) and have proven very popular and flexible. In their early days they would often build out the network to reach you, or give you a free connection if you acted as a relay site. They did suffer from reliability issues in the early days but I think that was more down to antennas being knocked out of alignment by the wind and they were always quick to fix. Obviously that won't be a problem for their fibre product. From what I've seen they're a decent option and I'd keep pushing for a well priced symmetrical product, they seem small enough to be flexible, although I do wonder if their recent funding means they will have to stick to the script from now on...

Thanks for your reply. I have several friends living in rural areas south of me who have also been their customers for a few years and happy with the service. Of course, with dialup their only alternative, they were easily pleased! Your reply has prompted me to send another email poking them a bit to see of they wouldn’t be wiling to put together a customised package of more symmetrical service. I think the minimum monthly price for their symmetrical service—admittedly 1 gig up/down—is £575 per month on a 36-month contract. This is a bit too dear for my home business.

Long time lurker - nothing to do with GoFibre except as a customer - without them the only fibre available to me locally would still be on the backs of the sheep.

For various reasons the best any Openreach-based product available to me was forecast to be 60/18 in reality when installed it was 45/10 and slowly dropped to 22/6... I'm sure the 1375m copper part /75 (count 'em) whole metres fibre part had something to do with it - plus the take up of VDSL services by my neighbours etc. I'm happy with 300/30 (the limiting factor is generally the wifi on the device now) I get from GoFibre - they happen to be a local company to me so even better.

I had 1, 2 year contract with borderlink until 18 months ago and it was the WORST mistake of my life

You could tell they were overloaded past the point of it being a joke at peak times as your connection dropped to F all. Then there was the mistakes in the setup, they thought they had a decent signal at one end on the survey, on install day it ended up on the other... both times I asked will the trees on the park block the signal in summer... they said no, guess what happened as soon as spring came around. they had to affix a dedicated point to point on a riser pole to get some signal on a good day...

every few weeks we got an email "planned maintenance outage between hours x and x"

Every our service is running at dial up or hours of time outs was replied with our ends fiine..

Eventually the boss admitted they should of never installed it at our house but that took a fight at which point they agreed to let us out of contract or renew monthly until our OR fibre was in.

Thanks. They haven’t contacted me yet about installation which is a bit surprising. Hopefully I’ll hear from them soon. At my US home I’m very spoiled by AT&T who give us 600 up and down for under $60 a month. The symmetric connection really ups the speed.

Yeah, my experience was that they overpromised on the availability date - but they were compromised locally by Openreach failing to desilt ducts on an agreed timetable... Once the fibre was outside the house they were there the next day doing the last 10 yards - since then it's been 300/30 throughout. Only time it slowed down was when I put my own router on and forgot to set the WAN port to gigabit - then I got a rock solid 100/30.

In reply to a post by hunnymonster:

they were compromised locally by Openreach failing to desilt ducts on an agreed timetable.

Openreach don't desilt ducts for altnets. The altnet does it themselves.

As a point of clarity to readers I presume that was their fixed radio based service rather than FTTP? That in itself has highly and hugely variable performance based on location etc.

To be fair this thread is about their FTTP based service.

In reply to a post by FibreBubble:

Openreach don't desilt ducts for altnets. The altnet does it themselves.

Same for duct collapses? My suspicion based on the obvious recent road scarring is that the duct was also repaired.

The altnets will clear any duct blockages themselves.