CEO of Gigaclear Wins Award for Contribution to FTTH in Europe UPDATE

The CEO of rural focused UK fibre optic ISP Gigaclear, Matthew Hare, has this afternoon been presented by the FTTH Council Europe with an award for his “outstanding contributions” to the acceleration of Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) ultrafast broadband technology in Europe.

Gigaclear is somewhat unique in that they’re one of only a very few commercial ISPs in the United Kingdom to have built a commercial model around deploying Gigabit capable FTTH technology into rural areas, which are normally too expensive to tackle (i.e. not enough potential customers to make such a huge investment viable).

The provider started life as a purely demand-led commercial operator, although they’ve since signed a large number of state aid supported multi-million pound contracts and raised huge amounts of private investment to help deploy even further. Today the ISP’s network covers 60,000 homes and businesses across 20 counties (15,000 subscribed) and they’re aiming for 150,000 premises by the end of 2020 (here).

Ronan Kelly, President of the FTTH Council Europe, said:

“At the FTTH Council Europe, our mission is to push for fibre connectivity to Connect Everyone and Everything, Everywhere. I think this couldn’t describe better your actions.”

Matthew Hare, CEO of Gigaclear, said:

“It is an honour to be recognised by such an influential industry body. Since 2010, we have been delivering on our quest to connect some of the UK’s hardest to reach communities to reliable, ultrafast broadband. Every day, we see the difference having a reliable internet connection can make to people’s lives and we remain committed to closing the digital divide, ensuring we put an end to rural isolation.

This is just the beginning. There is a lot more we aim to achieve with our fibre networks.”

Well deserved and congrats from ISPreview.co.uk too. Meanwhile Open Fiber received a similar award for their contributions in Italy.

UPDATE 4:58pm

The video has just been posted