Gigaclear and Truespeed Battle to Bring FTTP into Somerset Village

Residents of Walton-in-Gordano in rural Somerset (England) have become the latest in the county to find themselves in a rather unusual situation, where two alternative UK network (altnet) ISPs – Gigaclear and TrueSpeed – are proposing to extend their Gigabit capable “full fibre” (FTTP) broadband networks into the area.

At present the state aid supported Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) project with Gigaclear is already known to be targeting the coastal village of Walton-in-Gordano as part of their existing roll-out plan, which could see the ISP’s 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network reaching the area by 2020.

However that project has recently suffered some significant delays (here) and it’s now widely feared that it could take Gigaclear a lot longer before it reaches the rural community (a revised plan has yet to be agreed), which is home to around 300 people. As a result locals may be stuck using slow copper ADSL broadband lines for even longer.

But Gigaclear are no longer the only player in town and in a rare event TrueSpeed, which is another FTTP provider that operates in the region, has also proposed to extend their network into the same community. According to the North Somerset Times, this build could cost a hefty £500,000 and the ISP won’t agree to do the work unless 30% of local premises provisionally sign-up (demand-led commercial deployment).

Assuming locals agree then the network would take around 12-18 months to deploy, which seems likely to mean that TrueSpeed could get there before Gigaclear, raising questions over the latter operator’s use of public investment to do the same area.

Admittedly this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen TrueSpeed clash (overbuild) with other operators in the area (usually Openreach’s slower FTTC solution) and they don’t seem to mind, so long as there’s enough interest to make it worthwhile. In theory Walton-in-Gordano might even find itself with a choice of two FTTP providers, which is an extremely rare thing to see in any rural location.

TrueSpeed has set itself an aspiration of covering 75,000 premises by 2021 and possibly 200,000 by 2025 (here), although they tend not to say much about their roll-out progress in public. Much of their initial deployment has focused on the Chew Valley region but they’re also going beyond that.

Despite being a fairly young provider the ISP was in 2017 able to secure a huge investment of £75m from Aviva Investors to expand their network (here), which is powering their expansion. Today the ISP was also awarded with INCA’s Gold Standard Quality Mark (here).