Rural Full Fibre ISP Gigaclear Celebrates 250,000 UK Premises UPDATE

Alternative network ISP Gigaclear, which currently aims to reach 500,000 UK premises with their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network by the end of 2023, has today celebrated being able to close out the year with a total footprint of 250,000 premises passed across England.

The provider, which is being backed by Infracapital and last year secured some £525m worth of debt financing to fuel their expansion plans (here), has added 80,000 premises to their network during 2021 and is currently home to 50,000 customers (25% take-up as only 200k out of the 250k are Ready for Service). Put another way, they added a total of 12,300km (7,642 miles) during 2021, which they say is akin to “digging trenching which is almost equal to the UK’s total coastline“.

Despite this, the provider has suffered plenty of delays with their rollout, which most recently impacted their Fastershire contract in Herefordshire (here). But the pace of build has generally improved over the past year and Gigaclear said they would be announcing new build activity in communities around Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Warwickshire and Suffolk over the “coming months“.

Gareth Williams, CEO at Gigaclear, said:

“I am incredibly proud of what the Gigaclear team has achieved to date. We know that access to fast and reliable broadband is now more vital than ever, especially in rural locations. With over 10 years of experience designing and building the full fibre network we have now scaled up and are rapidly expanding our network not just to new communities but into new counties. The teams are geared up and fighting fit for the challenge.”

Customers can today expect to pay from £49 per month for a symmetric speed 300Mbps package (currently discounted to £24 for the first 18-months of service) and free installation, which rises to £79 for their top 900Mbps plan (currently discounted to £49).

UPDATE 16th Dec 2021

Gigaclear has also given an update on their progress in the East of England, which we’ll add here. Overall, the ISP connected a further 20,000 premises to its network in the East of England this year (i.e. Essex, Hertfordshire, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire), taking the total number of premises who can access the ultrafast service in the area to 34,000.

Braintree is Gigaclear’s largest network build project to date, targeting over 20,000 homes and businesses, and is due to conclude by the end of 2022. Over 50 percent of the pure fibre network is now built with a total of 6,500 live connections expected by the end of 2021. More towns and villages in the region are due to be announced in 2022.