Gigaclear Secure Extra £6.5m to Boost Rollout of 1Gbps Rural Broadband

Rural fibre optic ISP Gigaclear, which specialises in rolling out 1000Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband services to rural communities across the United Kingdom, has today announced the successful raising of another £6.5 million from investors that will help them to reach an additional 6,000 homes and businesses.

Last year saw the ISP raise £2.75m via an Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and another £5m came from Neil Woodford’s new CF Woodford Equity Income Fund (Gigaclears first institutional investor). Shortly after that the provider also announced its intention to float onto the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange (here).

At the time Gigaclear said that their “medium-term” plan could eventually push the FTTP service out to 200,000 premises (note: this appeared to be based on a total potential capital of £180m). Admittedly that goal is still someway off, but the ISP continues to grow and today’s funding boost should be a big help.

As before the new equity financing has been raised from both existing and new institutional and private shareholders with the CF Woodford Equity Income Fund. As part of this Gigaclear now has its second institutional investor, Forward Private Equity, which has contributed £2.5m of today’s £6.5m additional investment (i.e. Gigaclear has over 100 private and institutional shareholders).

Matthew Hare, CEO of Gigaclear, said:

“The staff, management, Directors and shareholders of Gigaclear are determined to accelerate our delivery of ultrafast broadband. With strong support from existing and new shareholders, we will meet the record demand we are seeing for our transformational broadband.

Rural communities across the UK realise that they can leapfrog a whole generation of technology with a new, ultrafast, pure fibre network that can scale to thousands of megabits per second, future proofing the communities for many many years and allowing them, even today, to reap benefits not yet available to many towns and cities in the UK. We are already putting this new investment to work, building new networks and serving thousands of homes and businesses.”

Sadly today’s press release doesn’t specify where Gigaclear intends to roll-out next, although we know that they currently own and operate 17 rural fibre networks across Oxfordshire, Kent and Rutland, and have 20 more under construction across Oxfordshire, Kent, Rutland, Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire. Several hundred rural communities (400+ at the last count in 2014) have also asked them to invest in their respective areas.

It’s worth pointing out that Gigaclear aimed to push their network out to reach 10,000 premises (across approximately 25 networks) by the end of last year, although today’s PR says they only have 17 networks live, so we’re unsure how on-target they were with that goal. This is important because their other aspiration was to hit 50,000 premises by the end of 2015, which seemed like a rather tricky goal given the rural areas they work in.