Gigaclear Expands FTTP Rollout in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire

Rural UK ISP Gigaclear has announced that they’ve completed a revision of their “full fibre” (FTTP) broadband roll-out contract with the Fastershire project in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire (England), which alongside their commercial commitment initially planned to cover more than 70,000 premises but will now reach 110,000.

At present the Fastershire project, which harnesses various different contracts with Openreach (BT), Gigaclear, Airband, Full Fibre Limited and Glide (among others), expects to extend “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) coverage to over 97% of properties in both counties by 2022 (at the end of 2019 the figures stood at c.90% in Herefordshire and c.95% in Gloucestershire).

However the most recent contracts have largely focused upon extending “gigabit-capable” Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) networks, although Gigaclear is known to have suffered some big delays due to problems caused by the provider’s previous management (here).

The good news is that Gigaclear, working with Fastershire, has finally finished revising both their state aid supported contract and commercial commitment to the area, which will result in the total number of properties in the network being increased to 110,000 (includes 9.5k premises in the Lot 1 scheme).

The revised network design is also said to include an update of the anticipated delivery timings for each community, “bringing some forward and pushing others back“, with the overall completion of this significant civil engineering programme now likely to be September 2022.

Peter Pentecost, Gigaclear’s Regional General Manager, said:

“Since our partnership with Fastershire began back in 2015 we have connected over 34,000 homes and businesses across Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, bringing the fastest broadband speeds to some of the most remote properties in the UK. Although we’ve been slowed down by COVID-19, we’ve continued our work in both counties where safe to do so, as our work is considered essential by government, and we’re now actively building in 125 communities.

However, this rollout in the most rural parts of the counties is an enormous civil engineering project and is extremely complicated. As with all works of this scale, there are a number of obstacles that can spring up unexpectedly and, because of the way our network works, delays experienced in one community build will impact the start dates for communities further down the build programme. But I am happy to say that with the organisational changes we have made recently, our ability to better forecast our delivery has now improved significantly.

We are really pleased to be able to build to more properties, and to bring delivery dates forward for some communities. However, we do understand that for those communities where the delivery timings have moved back, some significantly so due to a reconfiguration of the plans, the new network update will be frustrating news.

The movement in delivery timings is primarily due to three changes we have made to our programme; firstly bringing on additional contractor resources to increase build capacity has meant changing the build order to avoid the extra resources tripping over each other and causing traffic chaos. Secondly, to accommodate additional properties into the build necessitated a redesign of part of the network; and thirdly, the build rollout had to be reordered to ensure all properties connected can be made live as we go, rather than having areas of network dormant waiting for other parts to be completed which is even more frustrating for customers.

However, we are taking action to increase the speed of delivery. We have spent the last year expanding our team in the region, opening a new office in Gloucester and vastly growing our Operational and Delivery teams. And we have made changes to some of the network designs to ensure we are building our network in the most efficient way possible.”

The challenge now will be for Gigaclear to show that they can deliver on the promised improvement to their roll-out pace. Unlike similar difficulties experienced in the Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) project, which resulted in Gigaclear losing that contract (here), the Fastershire programme has opted to maintain their agreement and allowed the ISP time to correct for their previous mistakes.

Meanwhile the Fastershire scheme is still in the process of developing a new strategy for the future, which could see additional contracts being signed to help further extend full fibre coverage and possibly also the launch of a new Fastershire Community Broadband Grant (like a voucher scheme with talk of individual grants worth up to £5,000) to help upgrade the hardest to reach locations (here).