Gigaclear Moot 1Gbps FTTP Broadband for 8 Rural Peterborough UK Villages

Gigaclear has today announced tentative plans to make their 1000Mbps (Megabits per second) capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) based fibre optic broadband ISP network available to 1,500 homes and businesses across eight rural villages near Peterborough in England.

Under the current plan Gigaclear would seek to leverage backhaul capacity for the new service by linking into CityFibre’s £30m Peterborough CORE platform, which is currently being built and will soon stretch 90km of fibre optic cable around the city (here).

The ISP believes that it can harness this new network to feed ultrafast broadband speeds into the nearby villages of Ashton, Bainton, Barnack, Helpston, Marholme, Pilsgate, Tallington and Ufford. Apparently many of the residents of these communities have been “campaigning for better broadband for a considerable time“.

Marco Cereste, Leader of Peterborough City Council, said:

“People in rural areas have long-complained of slow broadband and so I am delighted Gigaclear is planning to bring incredibly high speeds to villages around Peterborough.

Having the fastest broadband speeds won’t just make it better for residents, it will also help businesses in rural areas and make it more attractive for some companies to move there.

This is another step in making Peterborough and the surrounding area amongst the best connected places in the world.”

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, said:

“As a company that believes in the transformational effects of Gigabit connectivity, CityFibre is delighted to provide Gigaclear backhaul connectivity via our Peterborough CORE fibre network. This project further demonstrates the value of metro fibre infrastructure, enabling satellite towns and villages to access next generation services from innovative providers like Gigaclear.”

Joe Frost, Gigaclear’s Marketing Director, said:

“We are delighted to take this opportunity, working with Peterborough City Council and CityFibre who can provide us with the network backhaul capacity we need to build this network. We are looking forward to starting to work with these communities to understand the level of demand, and being able to help them thrive.”

A community meeting to discuss Gigaclear’s proposal is due to be held at The Millstone in Barnack on Monday 23rd June at 7pm. Gigaclear has made a number of similar deployments around England and further details about the project can be found on their Peterborough Vale page.

However it must be stressed that the project is only in the early planning stages and as usual the ISP will need 30% of the communities to sign-up (show enough demand) before they can seriously consider building the network.