Gigaclear Close to Completion of West Berkshire FTTP Rollout

Rural fibre optic UK ISP Gigaclear has confirmed that their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in West Berkshire – built with support from public investment via the Superfast Berkshire project – is now nearly complete following massive delays. Some 14,000 local premises can already access the service.

Back in 2018 the Superfast Berkshire project revealed that both of their contracts with Openreach (BT) and Gigaclear were facing huge delays (here). The worst hit was Gigaclear’s long-running Phase 2 deployment for West Berkshire, which had targeted a “full fibre” roll-out to 16,011 premises by October 2017 but at the time was forced to push this back by 20 months to May 2019.

In the end Phase 2 is still on-going today, albeit with a smaller number of homes and businesses yet to be completed over the next two months. The delays were most likely caused by some of the same issues that affected their other Building Digital UK contracts at the time (here), although the company’s new owners (Infracapital) have been working hard to correct for mistakes made by the previous management.

The sheer difficulty and high cost of deploying FTTP into remote rural areas is another issue, which Gigaclear’s original management failed to fully appreciate in their planning. However we can’t blame the council for sticking with the massively late contract because the ISP is understood to have contributed around £16m to the project and only £3.7m came via public investment. Better extremely late, than never, perhaps.

Laura Jones, Gigaclear’s South Central GM, said (Kennet Radio):

“With any large-scale engineering project in a rural area, you are bound to encounter challenges but West Berkshire has had more than its fair share, hence why other network providers have overlooked it.

With Superfast Berkshire we have also been faced with unique obstacles including crossing the major network rail bridges and the extremely fast and busy M4 motorway. That’s why we invested heavily into this project, with further funding being provided by Building Digital UK (BDUK) and Superfast Berkshire. In fact, for every £1 of government contribution, Gigaclear invests up to £7 of commercial finance in the growth of our network across rural England.

The end result is connecting people that would have otherwise been left behind in terms of broadband access, which makes it all worthwhile.”

As it stands more than 700km of new fibre optic cable has been laid across rural West Berkshire by Gigaclear since the project began and “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) coverage is now said by the local council to stand at 96.2%, which is a little behind their original target of 98%. However independent data from Thinkbroadband puts the figure at 99% and they’re normally more cautious than official figures.

Now if only there was an update from the council for East Berkshire, as opposed to a year and a half of effective silence.