UPD Gigaclear Hail 10,000 UK Customers on Rural FTTH Broadband Network

Gigaclear, which specialises in rolling out ultrafast Gigabit Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP/H) broadband networks to rural parts of England, has today celebrated the news that their ever expanding service has managed to attract some 10,000 customers.

The ISP initially started life as more of a commercial demand-led operator, although over the past couple of years they’ve won a growing number of significant state aid broadband contracts (recent examples here, here and here) and these are helping to give their network coverage a significant boost.

So far Gigaclear has managed to deploy their 1000Mbps+ broadband service (they’ve also tested speeds of up to 5Gbps) to over 35,000 42,000 rural properties around counties such as Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Gloucestershire, Kent, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Rutland and Worcestershire.

At the current rate we’d expect their network coverage to at least double over the next few years and more contracts look set to be scooped. As evidence of that they’ve recently had to open a new / expanded office at Abingdon Business Park in Oxfordshire (here).

Matthew Hare, CEO of Gigaclear, said:

“We delivered our first full fibre network in rural Rutland at the end of 2011 and I’m very proud that in just over five years, Gigaclear has become such a significant challenger in the rural broadband market.

We are the only network delivering a totally futureproof, full fibre network that guarantees minimum upload and download speeds of 50Mbps and access to Gigabit speeds in rural areas and I am very much looking forward to bringing our service to many tens of thousands more customers in the future. This is just the beginning.”

In fairness we should point out that there are several other rural focused FTTP/H networks offering Gigabit broadband speeds, such as the popular B4RN service that operates around Lancashire and its neighbouring counties.

Meanwhile the provider’s 10,000th customer, David Roberts from a village near Cirencester (Gloucestershire), was also awarded with a free celebratory Samsung 4K TV. Not bad going.

UPDATE 29th April 2017

Gigaclear informs that their latest network coverage figure states FTTP is now available to 42,000 premises.