Rural UK ISP Gigaclear Extend Full Fibre Rollout into Brackley
Rural broadband ISP Gigaclear has announced that 3,000 homes and businesses in the market town and civil parish of Brackley in West Northamptonshire (England) will be the next to benefit from their rollout of a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network. Locals will soon be able to access speeds of up to 900Mbps.
The move makes sense because, at present, the only other gigabit-capable network in the area is from Openreach (top of the town), while Gigaclear’s existing network is already present in nearly all of the surrounding communities. However, Swish Fibre has also announced their intention to build across Brackley, and their deployment looks as if it will begin – at some scale – next month.
The move is ultimately part of Gigaclear’s £700m investment (here and here) to reach 500,000 rural UK premises by the end of 2023 (they’ve already completed 300,000). Once live, customers will pay from £17 a month (discounted rate) for a symmetric 200Mbps broadband package on an 18-month term (£40 thereafter) and that rises to £49 (£79 thereafter) for their top 830Mbps plan. All packages include a wireless router and free installation.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Huh. Openreach will be coming here soon as well (probably as soon as they’ve finished Banbury). I can’t help thinking that there’s a lack of joined up thinking here.
Anyway I like my current ISP (IDNet) so I reckon I’ll be waiting for Openreach. No great hardship though since I already have a 67/19 FTTC connection.
FTTP from BT/Openreach is probably only available in few new build homes North of Brackley. Gigaclear said that they will not be connecting us at least until May 2023, but this might change. It is more likely that Swish Fibre will be connecting customers sooner, as they have done quite a lot of work in Brackley.
I’m aware of the current situation but openreach listed Brackley as due to get FTTP before end of 2025 a couple of years ago. It’s curious because this is not a case of altnets going where openreach fears to tread. It’s apparently altnets reacting to openreach and choosing to race them.