Full fibre UK broadband ISPs Hyperoptic and Gigaclear have once again made it into the Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100 for 2019, which is a league table of Britain’s top 100 private technology companies with the fastest-growing sales over the latest 3 years. But they have both fallen in rank.
According to the Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100 page, Hyperoptic is ranked 51st with 667 staff and an average 3 year sales growth of 86.60% (they were ranked 26th last year and 17th the year before). By comparison Gigaclear is ranked above them in 49th with 240 staff and an average 3 year sales growth of 87.19% (they were ranked 23rd last year).
In the 19 years that Teck Track has run, only 20 companies have been listed for three consecutive years and just 1% of all companies to have been featured. Obviously that’s a very good result for Hyperoptic and Gigaclear also did well, particularly given thee latter’s recent struggles with deployment.
Dana Tobak CBE, MD and CEO of Hyperoptic, said:
“We’re thrilled to have been listed again. This is a recognition of our role in leading the charge to Gigabit Britain and our success in making full fibre the UK’s broadband infrastructure of choice. Nine years ago, Hyperoptic was just an idea – now we employ over 1,300 staff and offer our hyperfast connectivity across 50 UK cities.”
We should point out that a number of other telecom related companies also feature in this year’s table. Light Source, which helps design and build fibre-optic broadband networks for major ISPs, is ranked 18th and plan.com, which is a service provider for O2 (i.e. packages minutes, texts and data under its own brand), is ranked 28th.
Finally, the imaginatively named Internet Mobile Communications (IMC), which is as a mobile app for international calls and messages, has been ranked 23rd.
How are their sales in Devon & Somerset?
I expect Gigaclear’s sales in Devon & Somerset are about the same as in some of the Gloucestershire BDUK lots – zero. We are still waiting for the new roll-out plans to replace the failed plans that were agreed a few months ago, which replaced the previous failed plans.
Wish Hyperoptic would sort out the problems in the Greenland Dock area SE16 – been waiting over a year – still stuck on a status of installation agreed
There is a discrepancy in some of the stats quoted by the various sources: “Hyperoptic is ranked 51st with 667 staff” vs. “now we employ over 1,300 staff”.
Good point. I wonder if that’s just due to the Sunday Times using data from before the recent funding deal, which Hyperoptic is busy scaling-up to match in the deployment sense.
Hyperoptic confirmed the data discrepancy is due to the Tech Track data being based on the last full year of results for each company (Dec 2018), which doesn’t factor in their recent work to scale-up operations through 2019.
Gigaclear was put in where I live (village east of Oxford) a few years ago but is still far too overpriced to consider, their slowest package has been lowered from £40 to £35 a month but the speed has been lowered with it from 50mbps to 35m, and they still want £100 connection fee, apparently their WiFi is poor with the equipment they send you so unless you know how/what to use instead?, now Gigaclear fibre is in place it’s even less likely BT will ever put it in and allow shopping for a good deal,if Gigaclear will never allow other providers to use their network it would be better if they’d never come to this area.
Playing devil’s advocate a bit. There’s not much hope for FTTP providers and related investment in rural communities if you think Gigaclear is expensive.
I do sort of agree with Jason – I looked at Gigaclear’s pricing recently and it seems to be designed to push people to the £45 300Mbps tier – which I would say is good value. The £35 30Mbps one isn’t. If they could knock £5 off and start at 50Mbps it would start to look better.
Having said that I would assume a lot of the Gigaclear customers are coming from fixed wireless services at which point all the tiers look like a bargain. A colleague of mine in Essex can get reasonable FTTC, so would need to get to the £45 plan before they started seeing improvements in their download speed.
The Gigaclear business packages are expensive – and the SLA, although improved from what it was, is still not attractive for the price. The top speeds are well into the leased line price range, but contended with no committed rate.
I wonder why Cityfibre didn’t make the cut?