UK ISP Rutland Telecom Fix Broadband Altnet Woes in Essendine Village

Rural focused Internet provider Rutland Telecom (Gigaclear) appears to have now resolved the broadband problems that recently beset Essendine village in the East Midlands of England, which initially resulted in the local parish council perhaps unfairly describing the small ISP as a “virtual monopoly“.

The ISP originally installed a Sub-Loop-Unbundled (SLU) FTTC broadband service in the village during 2010 (here) because BT had failed to do so. But locals recently reported performance problems with the service and on top of that the area found itself excluded from the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) deployment after it was deemed to already have a superfast service.

Unfortunately this combination of factors caused a great deal of frustration (here) and Rutland Telecom ended up taking some of the flak with Essendine Parish Council describing them as a “virtual monopoly” for being “reluctant to share its cabinet with other UK ISPs“. Never mind the fact that they installed an alternative when BT wouldn’t, albeit one that clearly had some issues.

Happily the local Parish Councillor and Essendine Fast Broadband Campaigner, Bob Trickey, has now informed ISPreview.co.uk that Rutland Telecom’s work to resolve the network problems has just completed. This included changing their local equipment and visiting every customer to ensure routers and cabling were correctly installed.

Bob Trickey told ISPreview.co.uk:

“It is early days but so far all their customers have a good phone connection, faster broadband ( around 45Mb/s ) and no interruptions. A few remaining niggles appear to be down to the BT lines from cabinet to premises that are getting attention from Open Reach.

Further meetings are planned to continue the improved relationship between Rutland Telecom and Essendine, which will include opening up to other ISP companies, package pricing and service levels, all very positive.”

Mr Trickey said that locals remained “disappointed at the BDUK requirement to exclude us from the Rural Programme” but he suggested that most of this “frustration” needed to be expressed towards the European Commission (EC) for the way their EU state aid guidelines were written (2013/C25/01). Trickey added that a bigger annoyance was that “BT will not include our village in its commercial rollout because we are too small to be financially viable“.

Apparently BT has now proposed a “self funded installation” as a solution to the problem but this would “cost a lot more per household” than Rutland Telecom charged, although it remains the basis for some on-going discussions and Mr Trickey is “hopeful of future progress“.