Gigaclear Spotted Building FTTP Broadband in Bagshot, Surrey UK

Rural focused UK broadband ISP Gigaclear has been spotted deploying their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network infrastructure into the large Surrey village of Bagshot (population 5,600), which appears to be somewhat of a first for the provider as they haven’t previously announced much for the county.

At present Gigaclear’s full fibre network is currently available to 170,000 premises across various different parts of rural England, and they aim to reach 500,000 UK properties by 2023. But the closest deployment they have to Bagshot in Surrey is the recently announced build for 4,300 premises in Ascot (here), including a further 4,400 properties in the neighbouring village of Sunninghill (Berkshire).

According to local resident David Harkis, one of Gigaclear’s new cabinets (pictured) has been built close to the Bagshot Telephone Exchange. In addition, if you input nearby postcodes into the provider’s website, then it reports that “We are on our way.. [and] currently building to you as fast as we can“, which is as opposed to the usual “Really Sorry! Your property is not currently included in our build plans.”

Some postcodes in the nearby Surrey heath village of Windlesham also appear to be in the plan, although officially Gigaclear seem to suggest that this work is all part of reaching their Berkshire builds. The operator did not confirm a rollout plan for Bagshot, despite what their coverage checker appears to indicate, and indeed we can’t see any build plans for the area, but they do hint at the future possibility of something happening.

Laura Jones, South Central General Manager at Gigaclear, said:

“We are currently present in Bagshot performing survey work as part of our network resiliency for East Berkshire. As part of this work it is quite common for us to also use it as an opportunity to consider future network build design.”

In the meantime, it’s worth noting that rival ISP Swish Fibre also plans to deploy FTTP into Bagshot (here) and another altnet, toob, is already in the process of deploying across the nearby town of Camberley (here); although the latter has not mentioned Bagshot before. Neither Virgin Media, nor Openreach, have done much to extend their gigabit-capable services into the town.