Gigaloch’s Full Fibre Network Goes Live in More of West Cheshire

The Fibre for Ashton Hayes, Horton cum Peel, Mouldsworth & Manley (F4AMM) campaign group in rural West Cheshire (England) has revealed that UK ISP Gigaloch, which has been building a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across the area since last year, has finally started to go live.

We haven’t had any solid updates on Gigaloch’s builds or future plans since last year, so it’s pleasing to see that they’re making some progress on their initial builds. The operator originally started their build in Mollington (West Cheshire) and is currently also aiming to cover around 5,000 premises across Inverness-shire (e.g. Abraichan), as well as 600 premises around Loch Tay (Highlands of Perthshire) and other locations.

The good news from the F4AMM campaign today is that a number of properties have now gone live in Manley, just outside of Chester. “The build currently encompasses 3 villages. Mouldsworth, Manley and Ashton Hayes just outside of Chester. After multiple issues along the way, we are finally seeing the benefits of full fibre in a rural setting,” said F4AMM’s Anthony Jones.

New customers get the installation and first year of service for free, which reflects an unlimited 1Gbps package (200Mbps upload), and after that the price becomes £35 per month (this is frozen until 2025). Interestingly, the minimum term for this package is just 12-months, so we assume that Gigaloch are banking on nobody deploying a rival FTTP network for that model to make sense.

However, a lot of the funding for their deployments will be coming from the Government’s rural-focused Gigabit Vouchers, although this is usually only intended to help cover the physical infrastructure installation and not monthly service rental.