Gigaclear’s FTTP Broadband Delays Spread to Northamptonshire

Alternative rural UK ISP Gigaclear is still reeling from the embarrassment of having to make a public apology for the “significant” delays to their roll-out of “full fibre” (FTTP) ultrafast broadband in Devon and Somerset (here). Now they’ve also had to do the same for Northamptonshire.

Last week’s announcement noted that the delays had emerged because “fundamental issues existed including management of subcontractors, build methodology and capacity within the team” (e.g. it’s been difficult to find enough skilled engineers, which is a general industry issue that we’ve highlighted a few times before).

At the time the Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) noted that Gigaclear was experiencing “delivery challenges in a number of other areas, however none of the other areas are subject to the delays which the CDS programme has experienced.” We’ve yet to see the new plan for CDS and so it’s a little hard to judge, but some people in other areas are now saying that the delays could be just as bad elsewhere.

Since last week’s update various complaints have reached our inbox and most of those tend to focus on delays in parts of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire (they have a £90m deal with Complete Utilities to reach 70,000 premises in those two), which we covered on Thursday (here). However locals in Northamptonshire have since suggested that the delays they’re seeing may be even worse.

The Northamptonshire Project

So far Gigaclear has won two contracts with the County Council to deliver part of Stage 3 under the Superfast Northamptonshire project. Both were signed in January 2017 (here) and according to the scheme’s website they currently aim to provide broadband speeds of up to 1Gbps to over 6,336 premises by the end of March 2019 (the original Jan 2017 announcement pegged completion even earlier, at December 2018).

A total of £6.58m of public money is being invested in Stage 3 (£4.9m from the county council and £1.68m the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme), while Gigaclear will be investing £3.65m. We should point out that the operator also has a big commercial deployment on-going in the area, which should take their total coverage to around 25,000 premises.

Fast forward a little bit and in November 2017 Gigaclear signed a new deal with civil engineering company the John Henry Group to help them deliver on 21,000 of the planned premises. Unfortunately since then the progress has been flaky, as illustrated by this useful comparison of how Gigaclear’s LOT 2 roll-out plan (live plan) has changed from February 2018 to October 2018 (Credit to Jason for helping us with this).

A lot of areas now appear to be suffering from delays and these seem to range from around 3-6 months to the dizzy heights of c.21 months. For example, at the start of this year building was supposed to complete in Chacomb by Q3 2018 but it will not now complete until Q2 2020 and some locals fear further delays. As one of those affected residents told us (Jason), “I have no confidence work will start as planned.”

Interestingly we took a long look at various council meeting documents between June and October 2018 but none of them, including those that were intended to deliver an update on the Superfast Northamptonshire project, alluded to any clear delays (note: this won’t cover Gigaclear’s commercial deployments).

Mind you this recent cabinet update did note a £1.6m reduction in forecast expenditure on Superfast Broadband, which occurred because “suppliers have revised milestone dates targets resulting in payments slipping into 2019-20” (Gigaclear isn’t mentioned in the context, so it could just as easily apply to Openreach). Thankfully Gigaclear has been kind enough to furnish us with a statement.

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

“Gigaclear has worked collaboratively with Northamptonshire County Council on the Stage 3 programme to bring full fibre, high speed broadband to rural Northamptonshire and significant progress has been made to date. However, due to a supplier unfortunately pulling out of the project, some communities have experienced a delay whilst a new contractor was appointed.

We are now working hard on the delivery of a revised deployment plan which will be submitted to Northamptonshire County Council in November to ensure the rollout programme is accelerated and delivered against the new schedule. We will be increasing resources across the region as part of this revised plan.

We would like to extend our apologies for this delay and to reassure residents that we are committed to delivering fast broadband services as part of the Superfast Northamptonshire project.”

As usual we should stress that delays with major broadband projects do happen and with different operators too (we’ve reported on plenty of problems with Openreach and Virgin Media etc. in the past), particularly so when it involves the heavy civil engineering required for deploying Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology. Never let it be said that doing “full fibre” is easy or cheap.

Meanwhile it seems that one of Gigaclear’s biggest challenges has stemmed from having to rapidly scale-up their FTTP deployments in a market where many other operators are trying to do the same thing. On top of that there’s already a shortage of skilled telecoms engineers, which adds a further complication.

Hopefully going forward the ISP will be able to keep to their revised dates, once published. One positive aspect is that they do appear to have enough financial backing to carry their various contracts through to completion and all credit to them for apologising.