Almost 1,000 homes and businesses around Aberdeenshire and Aberdeen are next in line for full-fibre broadband as one of Scotland’s largest publicly funded digital-infrastructure programmes moves through the North East. Behind the local roadworks is a £105 million government contract intended to reach places where the commercial broadband market has struggled to justify building on its own.
New fibre lines are being laid through another group of North East communities as a £105 million government-backed broadband programme moves from contract and survey work into streets, villages and rural settlements.
GoFibre says construction is now underway in St Fergus, Inchmarlo, Kincardine O’Neil, Collieston and Newburgh in Aberdeenshire, together with Kingswells on the western edge of Aberdeen.
Almost 1,000 homes and businesses are included in the latest phase.
Once completed, the network will be capable of providing full-fibre connections directly to individual premises, with GoFibre selling packages offering speeds of up to one gigabit per second.
The immediate numbers are modest beside Scotland’s national telecommunications networks. The significance lies in where the work is taking place and what is paying for much of it.
The North East build is part of Project Gigabit, the UK Government programme created to take gigabit-capable broadband into areas considered unlikely to receive adequate commercial investment quickly enough on their own.
In Scotland, the contracts are being procured and managed by the Scottish Government.
GoFibre was awarded the North East contract in July 2025. Worth £105 million in public funding, it is intended to provide gigabit-capable infrastructure to around 63,000 hard-to-reach premises across Aberdeenshire, Aberdeen City, Angus, Dundee, Moray, Highland and parts of Perth and Kinross.
The first connections were originally expected from summer this year. Construction subsequently began across communities including Longforgan, St Cyrus, Auchenblae, Montrose and Laurencekirk, with parts of the new network now moving into service.
The latest Aberdeenshire work marks another stage in a build that will ultimately be larger than the government contract itself.
GoFibre says it intends to connect additional properties commercially alongside the publicly supported premises, taking its planned North East network to at least 100,000 homes and businesses.
That combination of subsidy and private expansion is central to the economics of rural broadband.
In cities and large towns, a network builder can spread the cost of ducts, fibre, engineers and equipment across streets containing hundreds or thousands of potential customers. In rural Scotland, the same infrastructure may have to travel much farther to reach considerably fewer premises.
The underlying economics become harder as population density falls.
Public intervention is intended to change that calculation, paying towards construction in locations which might otherwise remain behind while allowing network operators to build outward into neighbouring areas where commercial service can then become viable.
The latest announcement does not identify how many of the almost 1,000 premises in St Fergus, Inchmarlo, Kincardine O’Neil, Collieston, Newburgh and Kingswells are being reached directly through the subsidised Project Gigabit contract and how many form part of GoFibre’s additional commercial build.
That boundary matters because the wider North East programme consists of both.
What is clear is that Scotland still carries a substantial geographical broadband gap despite rapid improvement in national coverage.
Ofcom’s latest detailed Scotland figures show that 71 per cent of residential premises had access to full-fibre networks by July 2025, an increase of nine percentage points in a year.
That represented another 250,000 Scottish homes gaining potential access to full fibre.
But the national figure concealed a much wider gap between urban and rural Scotland.
Full fibre was available to 76 per cent of urban residential premises and only 50 per cent of rural ones. Gigabit-capable coverage, which includes some technologies other than fibre running all the way into the property, reached 89 per cent in urban Scotland but only 51 per cent in rural areas.
Scotland also remained the UK nation with the lowest overall proportion of residential premises covered by full fibre.
The gap is narrowing. Rural full-fibre availability increased by eight percentage points in the year covered by Ofcom’s report, and rural take-up where full fibre was available was considerably stronger than in cities.
About 60 per cent of Scottish rural premises able to order full fibre had taken a service, compared with 40 per cent in urban areas.
That suggests the remaining problem is not simply persuading rural households to buy faster broadband once it reaches them. In many places it is still getting the physical network there at all.
For villages such as Collieston or Kincardine O’Neil, broadband infrastructure has increasingly become part of the same economic calculation as transport, electricity and mobile coverage.
A poor connection affects more than entertainment.
Cloud accounting, card payments, agricultural systems, tourism bookings, remote professional work, online public services, security systems and ordinary communications now assume the presence of stable digital infrastructure. The effect is particularly noticeable for small businesses which may be operating from farms, workshops or homes rather than purpose-built commercial premises.
The expansion of home working since 2020 has added another reason for broadband quality to affect where people can realistically live.
That gives fibre investment a demographic dimension in areas facing population ageing or the loss of younger working residents. A village cannot reverse those pressures with broadband alone, but weak connectivity can become another reason for businesses and workers to locate elsewhere.
The government programme is therefore intervening in a market failure with economic consequences extending beyond internet speeds.
The financial structure behind GoFibre’s Scottish expansion is also more complex than the £105 million public contract alone.
In August 2025, the Scottish National Investment Bank announced a £125 million financing package supporting GoFibre’s delivery of Project Gigabit and wider fibre construction in Scotland.
The package consisted of a £45 million debt facility from the publicly owned investment bank and £80 million from Hamburg Commercial Bank.
The financing was intended to support more than 130,000 premises being built by GoFibre across Scotland, including the North East contract and a separate Project Gigabit programme covering the Borders and East Lothian.
GoFibre is also backed by Gresham House’s British Sustainable Infrastructure Funds.
The result is an infrastructure programme assembled from several different forms of capital: direct government subsidy for uneconomic premises, debt provided partly by a Scottish public investment institution, international bank finance and private infrastructure investment.
That money is supporting an independent network operator rather than extending only the infrastructure of the established national telecoms companies.
GoFibre was founded in Duns in the Scottish Borders in 2017 and is headquartered in Edinburgh. By July this year it said its network passed more than 135,000 premises across northern and eastern Scotland and northern England.
The company has already used Project Gigabit contracts south of the border, completing builds in North Northumberland and Durham-Teesdale before the larger Scottish programmes moved into construction.
Its North East contract is considerably larger.
The Scottish Government described the £105 million award as covering some of the most rural parts of the seven local-authority areas involved. Building Digital UK records the same contract at approximately 63,000 premises.
Neither figure means every property across those council areas will receive GoFibre.
Project Gigabit works from address-level intervention areas, targeting particular premises rather than giving a provider responsibility for an entire local authority.
Existing commercial networks, planned private builds and other government programmes can all sit alongside it.
The history of publicly supported broadband in Scotland already stretches back through the Digital Scotland Superfast Broadband programme and the Scottish Government’s Reaching 100% programme.
R100 alone has involved more than £600 million of investment from the Scottish and UK governments and BT, with more than 96,000 connections enabled for faster broadband by the latest government count.
Project Gigabit is now building on that infrastructure with a different threshold: the objective is no longer merely to provide what was once regarded as superfast broadband, but to push gigabit-capable networks into the remaining harder-to-reach areas.
The change reflects how quickly expectations have moved.
A 30 megabit-per-second connection was once the target for modern broadband intervention. Full fibre can provide services measured in hundreds of megabits or a gigabit, with significantly more capacity available as equipment develops.
The fibre being placed in the ground now is therefore expected to remain useful long after the current retail speed packages have changed.
There is still a difference between a fibre cable passing a property and a customer actually using it.
Once construction is complete, residents and businesses have to order a service. The publicly funded programme creates access to the network; it does not provide every household with a free broadband subscription.
That distinction has become increasingly important as national coverage rises.
Ofcom found that only 43 per cent of Scottish premises able to obtain full-fibre service were actually using one in July 2025, although take-up was rising quickly.
The North East programme is now moving into the stage where those national percentages become decisions at individual addresses.
In St Fergus, Inchmarlo, Kincardine O’Neil, Collieston, Newburgh and Kingswells, the first visible sign is construction.
Behind it sits a £105 million public contract, £125 million of associated financing and a commercial plan intended to stretch the resulting network beyond the addresses government is directly paying to reach.
For almost 1,000 more North East properties, that infrastructure is now arriving at the roadside.
Sources
Scottish Government — Boosting broadband in the North East, 15 July 2025.
https://www.gov.scot/news/boosting-broadband-in-the-north-east/
Scottish Government Digital Connectivity — Project Gigabit: North East Scotland.
https://digitalconnectivity.campaign.gov.scot/north-east-scotland
Building Digital UK — Project Gigabit Network Build Contract: North East Scotland.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/project-gigabit-network-build-contract-north-east-scotland
Scottish National Investment Bank — Bank supports GoFibre’s rural broadband rollout.
https://www.thebank.scot/bank-supports-gofibres-rural-broadband-rollout
Ofcom — Connected Nations 2025: Scotland Report.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/multi-sector/infrastructure-research/connected-nations-2025/connected-nations-2025-scotland-report.pdf
Ofcom — 250,000 more Scottish households with access to full-fibre broadband, 19 November 2025.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/coverage-and-speeds/250000-more-scottish-households-with-access-to-full-fibre-broadband
GoFibre — Project Gigabit North East Scotland.
https://gofibre.co.uk/project-gigabit-northeast/
GoFibre — North East network expansion and commercial build.
https://gofibre.co.uk/the-scoop/gofibre-expansion-brings-world-class-connectivity-to-north-east/
ISPreview — GoFibre’s September 2026 update on North East Scotland gigabit broadband build, 17 September 2026.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2026/09/gofibres-sept-2026-update-on-north-east-scotland-gigabit-broadband-build.html
ThinkBroadband — GoFibre announces Aberdeenshire build to nearly 1,000 homes and businesses, 17 September 2026.
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/gofibre-announces-aberdeenshire-build-to-nearly-1000-homes-and-businesses
