Gigaclear to Complete Unfinished Builds in Devon and Somerset

A small but important update has just been issued, which confirms that UK rural “full fibre” broadband ISP Gigaclear has reached a settlement with the Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) project. As part of that the provider will continue a commitment to complete the work in areas that were started under the former contracts.

The ISP suffered a major setback last year after the CDS project scrapped their state aid supported contract to deploy a Gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across remote parts of both counties (here). Gigaclear made some big mistakes in their management and planning of the programme, which delayed the local roll-out by up to 2 years and in the end CDS lost confidence in their ability to deliver.

Sadly the situation also left a number of communities with unfinished FTTP deployments and forced the ISP to begin a review of their separate – albeit once complementary to the CDS plan – commercial roll-out in the region. As part of that commercial plan the operator had originally proposed to invest £67.3m in order to cover 43,000 premises across rural parts of Devon and Somerset.

The new statement from Gigaclear doesn’t spell out precisely what has been agreed with the CDS team but it does seem to suggest that those unfinished areas will now be completed.

Gigaclear Statement

Following the termination of the contracts in September 2019 between Connecting Devon & Somerset (CDS) and Gigaclear Ltd by CDS, both parties have announced that they have reached a settlement. Both parties will continue to focus on future plans for the delivery of broadband to the people of the region. CDS welcomes the terms of the settlement which will be reinvested in the local broadband programme.

CDS also welcomes Gigaclear’s commitment to continue with its roll-out of full fibre broadband in those communities where work started under the former contracts.

Gigaclear are continuing to invest in the region, delivering ultrafast broadband to homes and businesses, having now connected over 3000 properties to its network.

For further information see: https://www.gigaclear.com/devon-and-somerset

The ‘further information’ page mentioned above doesn’t add anything new and notes that Gigaclear has so far invested over £20m into the Devon and Somerset regions, although an update issued last year said that they’d so far only been able to build “over 7,000 POTS [Point of Termination] across the South West” (here); 7,000 premises from £20m works out to a very hefty per premises cost of around £2,857.

Just to confuse matters the above statement talks about 3,000 “connected“, although this sounds more like live customers than premises passed. Otherwise locals in areas of unfinished builds may want to keep an eye on Gigaclear’s availability checker. Meanwhile we continue to await details of their revised commercial plan for the two counties.