Last year we reported (here) that a new Fife-based broadband ISP called Gigaloch (Optilec) had begun building their own Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across a few remote rural communities in Cheshire (England) and Perthshire (Scotland). The good news is that one of their first networks, Mollington, has now gone live.
The community of Mollington, along with Stamford Bridge, were two of the provider’s first build locations (both exist outside of Chester). But we also know that they’re deploying across Ashton Hayes, Mouldsworth and Manley (F4AMM) in the same county, while over in Scotland we’ve seen mention of their work around other places, such as Strathallan and the Loch Tay area.
The provider’s website doesn’t give much away, but it does state that associated communities should also benefit from a “free hyperfast” connection for local schools, village halls and churches. On top of that, they’ve committed for 10% of their annual profits to be allocated to local good causes and the build itself might also include a degree of self-build by volunteers (some similarities to B4RN’s model).
New customers tend to get the installation and first year of service for free, which reflects an unlimited 1Gbps package (200Mbps upload), and after that the price becomes £35 per month (this is frozen until 2025). Suffice to say, we can’t help but wonder how they’re able to make a sustainable economic model from this, but no doubt time will tell. At present a lot of their funding will be coming from the Government’s Gigabit Voucher scheme.
Elsewhere, the leader of the F4AMM campaign, Anthony Jones, has posted a useful blog to show what Gigaloch’s in-home installations look like (here). The router appears to be a ZyXEL EX3301-T0 model, although it’s not clear what they’re using for the Optical Network Terminal (ONT).
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