Gigaclear Told to Revise Fastershire FTTP Broadband Rollout Plan UPDATE

The Fastershire scheme in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire (England), which is supported by both county councils and the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme, has ordered UK rural ISP Gigaclear to produce a new plan after their roll-out of Gigabit capable FTTP “full fibre” technology suffered delays.

Last year the ISP handed a £90m civil engineering contract for deploying their service into rural parts of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire to a company called Complete Utilities (here), which was expected to help extend their ultrafast Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based network to reach “almost” 70,000 premises in the two counties.

The provider already had a network established in Gloucestershire, but they needed to start from scratch in Herefordshire and this meant getting the crucial backhaul links finished before work in the county could begin. Nevertheless the deployment is now said by Fastershire to be “well under way,” with 9 community networks under construction and over 1,000 individual “connection pots” installed.

Meanwhile, in Gloucestershire, some 25 community networks are under construction with 5 already completed. However a new statement posted by Fastershire this week warns that Gigaclear’s plans are still “susceptible to delays as wayleaves are sought, negotiated and occasionally withheld and as detailed designs get refined to account for conditions on the ground.”

In other words, building in some areas has gone more quickly than expected but others have suffered “unexpected delays.”

Fastershire Statement

Fastershire is aware that a number of the start dates anticipated for certain communities have been missed and we understand the frustrations this has caused not least in terms of the accuracy and timeliness of information on the Fastershire website.

The project is working on improvements to the build reporting process and the Fastershire website that will enable the project to more accurately reflect the deployment dates and provide more progress updates at the local level.

In light of this, Fastershire has requested that Gigaclear produce a new deployment plan. The project expects to receive the new deployment plan in November and it will likely see some rescheduling. For some communities anticipated build start date may be sooner than previously stated but for other communities it may be later.

Fastershire will publish this information as soon as it is possible in line with the revised plan.

The development comes only a week after Gigaclear was forced to make a public apology for a separate roll-out contract in Devon and Somerset, which is said to have suffered “significant” delays (here), but that appears to have been much more serious than the problems facing them in the Fastershire scheme.

UPDATE 20th October 2018

Gigaclear has given us a comment on the above development.

Mike Surrey, CEO Gigaclear, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Gigaclear has worked collaboratively with Fastershire since 2015 on the programme to bring full fibre, high speed broadband to rural Herefordshire and Gloucestershire and significant progress has been made to date. The stage 3 build is well underway in Gloucestershire with network serving five communities live and a further 25 in construction, additionally in Herefordshire another 9 community areas are in build.

However, as wayleaves are sought, negotiated and occasionally withheld, and detailed designs are refined to account for conditions on the ground, we acknowledge that some communities have experienced a delay. We would like to reassure you that we are committed to delivering fast broadband services.

We would like to extend our apologies for this, we know how vital access to reliable broadband is and we are sorry for the frustration this has caused. We are now working hard on the delivery of the revised deployment plan which will be released in November, when it is fully agreed with Fastershire. To ensure the rollout programme is accelerated and delivered against the new schedule, we are increasing resources across the region.

We want to take this opportunity to reassure residents that we are committed to successfully delivering ultrafast broadband services to the region and improving our communications to the community.”