Gigaclear’s 1Gb FTTP Broadband Covers 3,000 Gloucestershire Premises

Rural ISP Gigaclear has confirmed that their State Aid supported Fastershire Phase 2 roll-out of 1Gbps (1000Mbps+) capable Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) broadband in Gloucestershire, which is focused upon the Cotswolds area, has now reached the half-way point with 3,000 premises passed.

The project, which is funded by £3 million of public investment from the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme and £7 million from Gigaclear itself, began its deployment phase at the end of 2015. At the last update in June 2016 they had covered 1,000 premises. Clearly the roll-out pace has improved and they’ve managed to add another 2,000 in a much shorter space of time.

The eventual target is to cover 6,495 premises (homes and businesses) by the end of 2017, which will focus upon locations such as Guiting Power, Cowley, Chedworth, Whelford, Bibury and Icomb among others.

Joe Frost, Business Development Director at Gigaclear, said:

“Earlier this year, St. Andrew’s school in Chedworth became the 1,000th Fastershire ultrafast property to go live, making it one of the best connected schools in Britain.

Now, more than double that number of properties have access to the same blisteringly fast Internet speeds, which is just remarkable when you consider how remote many of the Cotswolds villages are.

The pure fibre network is transforming rural communities, giving them the best broadband connection available. We’re now on the home straight for completing the project on time and on budget and are looking forward to thousands more properties being connected by the end of 2017.”

Sadly the latest update doesn’t offer a great deal of extra detail, except to say that Gigaclear’s network has so far been installed by using over 182 miles of fibre optic cable. Apparently around 2,000 of the 3,000 premises passed are “already able to have Gigaclear’s ultrafast broadband service” (despite the fuzzy language, we’re told this reflects take-up).

Meanwhile the overall Fastershire scheme, which is also being supported by Openreach (BT), aims to deliver around 90% “fibre broadband” coverage across both Gloucestershire and Herefordshire by the end of 2016. After that they hope that everyone “will be able to access the broadband services they need” by the end of 2018, which could be difficult to achieve.