Rural fibre optic broadband ISP Gigaclear has announced that they are to recruit 120 new, full-time engineers into their in-house team by the end of March 2021. The move is intended to support the on-going deployment of their 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across more of England.
The announcement follows several months after the provider secured £525m in financing to help drive a new long-term build strategy (here). Gigaclear’s previous ambition was to cover 350,000 rural premises with FTTP by the end of 2021, which would then rise to 500,000 by 2025 (they’ve so far done over 130,000 – April 2020).
Prior to today’s announcement the ISP has tended to prefer to outsource some of their civil engineering work to contractors and so the move to create a much larger in-house team is a significant development, which they clearly hope will give their roll-out pace a much needed boost (the provider is still recovering from a lot of major delivery delays).
Nathan Rundle, Delivery Director at Gigaclear, said:
“We’re proud to be recruiting externally at a time when so many other businesses are putting staff on furlough and making redundancies. It goes to show how fundamentally essential our work is as we continue to expand our network, helping families to stay in touch, allowing people to work from home, keeping communities connected, and so much more.
Not only do we have more customers than ever, but rightly, with so many working from home and relying on uninterrupted, ultrafast internet access, they’re demanding the very best in terms of service, and so we’re ensuring that we have the resource to continually drive up the quality of our network. Investing in our in-house field engineering team will help us become more responsive and also drive standards by setting a benchmark for our contractors to match in terms of quality and customer experience.
We’ll be providing full training and we’re looking to hire both senior and more junior roles from across different backgrounds. It’s particularly important for us to employ the right kind of people; those that are resilient and adaptable. The roles we’re filling offer a great deal of career progression for people with the right attitudes and a willingness to learn.”
Anybody interested can apply here.
Up to a point it is easier to control your own staff.
Flips the other way when it gets too big and the layers and HR strangle the thing.
Trouble is, man management is a lost art in many sectors.
Trick is to have small highly motivated teams whose productivity can be measured. With an experienced problem solver…..
I can see why you might want to do this to overcome isolated issues Rapidly without all the bother of subcontracting. Or where you just want to lay 100’s of meters of backhaul.
It is probably also to do with subcontractors being so stretched ATM with the general pace of rollout.
If they recruit these new engineers by the end of March 2021, it doesn’t give them much time to build to the remaining 220,000 properties by the end of 2021 – given that they have managed 130,000 in the past 5 years.
At least they seem to have stepped up the delivery of press releases significantly to about one a month. Maybe next month they will be able to say they have made some more connections?
Might help if they spent a little more time on fixing problems on their exiting network as well…
I keep an eye on one.network in the vain hope that there will be some work planned for my area, but a good proportion of the small number I do find in the Forest of Dean are for fixing faults in microducting – which has only recently been laid in the past few months – or other remedial work.
Like AnotherTim says there’s many many repairs on the ducting that’s installed only a year ago in my area. In our build area which was installed over 2 years at a very hit and miss schedule, we still have road crossings and POTs that aren’t connected to cabinets.
I’m still not able to have a connection as my POT has a block 2m from the POT entry. Both of my neighbours have connected to Gigaclear yet after chasing for 18 months I’ve just been told excuse after excuse and they ignore your e mails after a while.
A truly awful company in my opinion! Such a shame.
It’s good they are starting to build out again. We have been a customer for the last 3 years and apart from the occasional network issue we’ve been pretty happy. My only worry with them was they were so small and had lots of issues in other parts of the country I thought they might go out of business and put us back in the clutches of BT.
pablo
what sort of comment is that
I thought they might go out of business and put us back in the clutches of BT.
@Fastman. A lot of Gigaclear’s areas are locations where previously you could only get extremely slow speeds from Openreach / BT’s network. So clearly he means if Gigaclear died then they might be forced back on to that same old copper, again.
In reality of course that hasn’t happened and if it did then their FTTP network is still a valuable asset and would probably be taken over.
One the following is a typo, 150 in title, 120 in body text.
Oops, corrected.