UPDATE String of Network Outages Hit Rural FTTP Broadband ISP Gigaclear

Over the past week or so Gigaclear’s “ultrafast” fibre optic FTTP broadband network, which is focused on connecting tens of thousands of premises in various rural areas across England, has suffered a string of network outages and Internet connectivity disruption.

Network problems are of course quite normal for every broadband ISP and they’re usually location specific, with the worst issues often being caused by third-party contractors cutting through major cables or serious hardware failures. However over the past week or two a seemingly noticeable number of Gigaclear’s normally happy customers have become increasingly frustrated after being hit by a spate of service disruptions, one after the other.

The main problems appear to have started on 23rd January 2017 when a general outage (i.e. NOT area specific) impacted their core network and then another one hit a few days later on 26th January. Much like other ISPs Gigaclear chose not to elaborate on the cause of these problems.

Unfortunately yesterday (31st Jan) saw Gigaclear being hit by yet another “major outage“, which affected their network for much of the afternoon and into the night. This time around the ISP offered a little bit more detail and pointed the finger at a “major problem in a national trunk network.” The service has now been restored and Gigaclear said they “sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused.”

However the disruption, which comes at an awkward time because Gigaclear is currently in the running for several major state aid supported broadband contracts, has raised questions about the resilience of their growing network. We have requested further information on the recent outages from Gigaclear and are awaiting their response, which hopefully will offer a bit more detail than we’ve seen over the past week or two.

In the meantime we note that Gigaclear’s main national trunk network providers have just scheduled essential maintenance to take place between 6th (22:00) and 7th (07:00) of February, which may also result in a few outages but this should at least be restricted to their infrastructure in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire areas.

Customers will otherwise be hoping for more stability going forwards. However it’s worth remembering that no ISP is immune to major disruption, with BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and others all having plenty of experience with similarly significant events.

UPDATE 2nd Feb 2017

Sadly we’re still waiting for a comment from Gigaclear’s PR team, although one of their customers has kindly forwarded us an apology message that has just been sent out by the CEO. The letter includes a lot more information on the most recent problem.

Dear Customer

I am writing to you to apologise for the interruptions to your service due to the outages on our network in January: on behalf of everyone here at Gigaclear, sorry.

We aim to provide a service that is both fast and reliable, that lets you quietly enjoy the Internet in the way that suits you best. Unfortunately, due to four different technical problems in the month, some of our customers lost service four times.

The problem on Tuesday, was a loop-back within our core network caused by a misconfiguration in the systems of one of our partners. This meant that although our network was “up”, it passed no traffic for large ranges of our IP addresses, meaning that many customers (on these address ranges) could not access the Internet. This outage was for a total of between 4 hours 46 minutes and 5 hours 11 minutes. To fix the problem we had to identify it first in the partner’s network, which took us more time than we would have liked, but once the partner’s network was reconfigured, the Internet started working again and your service was restored.

This is not the trouble-free Internet access service that everyone at Gigaclear wants to provide you, and we will do better.

Yours sincerely,
Matthew Hare
Chief Executive
Gigaclear plc