Wowzers – UK ISP Gigaclear Trial 5000Mbps Fibre Optic Broadband Service

Forget the battle over that 10Mbps USO or the Government’s 24Mbps+ “superfast” target and who cares about “ultrafast” 100Mbps+ speeds? Yes you can forget all that because rural fibre optic ISP Gigaclear are about to add a 5000Mbps (5Gbps) broadband package to their options.

At present Gigaclear’s Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network is available to more than 10,000 premises in various rural communities across the United Kingdom and they’re growing at an increasingly rapid pace (here), which is being fuelled by big contract wins for new networks in Gloucestershire (here), Essex (here) and Berkshire (here) among many other places.

The fastest package available to customers covered by Gigaclear’s network is currently their symmetrical 1000Mbps service (Home 1000 Unlimited [H1000]), which costs £72 per month and £100 (one-off) for the installation.

However the limits of today’s Internet, as well as most domestic computer hardware (e.g. Ethernet ports), mean that you’re unlikely to ever be able to use all that speed, not least because a lot of online services would struggle to supply traffic to your connection at Gigabit speeds or even close to it (most people would struggle to even use a full 100Mbps, let alone 1000Mbps).

Never the less Gigaclear are keen to make a statement in this market, as well as to highlight just how future-proof pure fibre optic connectivity can become, and so from early 2016 they’ve pledged to trial a new 5000Mbps (5 Gigabits per second!) broadband package for both home and business subscribers (H5G and B5G).

Matthew Hare, Chief Executive of Gigaclear, said:

“We’re offering customers the chance to access absolutely phenomenal broadband speeds. To be clear, this is a premium service that gives the fastest Internet speeds in the country to those of our customers who want the best connection that they can get. But it won’t be long before there’s a greater need for a 5Gbps service as connectedness becomes an ever more important part of our everyday lives.

By launching the trial of this 5Gbps service now, we are showing all our customers that we are delivering a future proof network today, one which won’t need to be updated even as their usage massively increases in the years to come.”

Gigaclear claims that “all the signs” point to UK consumers being likely to “need this level of service soon“, although this perhaps depends upon how many years you attach to the use of the word “soon” as we’re presently nowhere near that point. Not to mention that at 5Gbps it wouldn’t take much to put a strain on even some major transatlantic links.

Admittedly the demands are only increasing and at some point Gigaclear’s expectations are likely to come true. At this point it’s worth considering that it might take 10-15 years or more to roll-out such a network to every UK property, as well as a good £20bn+ in the bank, and by completion we might be starting to need Gigabit speeds, at least in some situations (multiple 18K video streaming?).

Just to put this 5Gbps speed into some perspective (assuming you could find any online service capable of delivering it), a 50GB (GigaByte) XBox1 or PS4 game download on a 24Mbps connection would currently take about 5 hours to download. At 5Gbps that same 50GB download would complete in around one and a half minutes! Past a certain point it’s all a matter of time, like being able to do things in seconds or minutes rather than hours etc.

However such a service doesn’t come cheap and Gigaclear says that their H5G (Home) package will set you back £399 inc. VAT per month (£1,500 +vat for the business option), which isn’t really affordable for anybody except the richest of home owners.