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ISP Gigaclear Leave Essex Village Without Broadband for 2 Weeks

Friday, Sep 2nd, 2022 (8:05 am) - Score 2,816
gigaclear engineers in rural uk field

A small number of Gigaclear’s rural UK broadband customers on their new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network in Essex (Area 2) – primarily residents in the village of White Colne – have complained after a service fault resulted in a loss of connectivity that has so far persisted for two long weeks.

The area, which was originally covered by their full fibre network as part of the operator’s state aid supported Superfast Essex contract (Phase 3 – Lot 2 – Central North – location no. 19), appears to have lost connectivity on 19th August 2022 during Friday afternoon.

However, it took the provider until 23rd August before they could confirm that the fault, which is “causing loss of service in the area“, had been triggered by unspecified damage to one of their fibre optic cables in a “difficult location to access and work.”

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At this point ISPreview.co.uk started to receive complaints from locals, some of whom highlighted problems with getting a response from the provider. Fast-forward to 1st September and the outage still hadn’t been resolved, although after a bit of prompting, Gigaclear has finally furnished us with a useful update.

The provider informs us that a total of 13 premises have been affected and their call-out team, based in Northampton, arrived at White Colne at approximately 10pm on August 19. “They were unable to ascertain the precise location of the outage. Engineers returned again on the 22nd and discovered there had been a fibre strike caused by builders erecting new fences on farmland on Great Farm Road,” said a Gigaclear spokesperson.

Gigaclear Statement

There were a number of internal factors that contributed to the unacceptable delay in resolving the issue including a shortage in our available manpower resource. We will be reaching out to those affected by the outage to apologise and offer them a gesture of goodwill. Additionally, we will be carrying out an internal review of our processes to minimise the likelihood of situations such as this happening again.

Remedial work on the problem is due to be carried out today, which will hopefully resolve the issue. Nevertheless, the last update showing on their service status page is – at the time of writing – still the one they posted on 23rd August. Clearly, Gigaclear needs to do a bit more work on the communication side.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
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 .
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7 Responses

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  1. Avatar photo John says:

    Farmers are getting blamed yet again. First for polluting the air, now for environmentally friendly fibre that is supposed to be underground. Not that far stretch to connect Gigaclear investors to ESG scores, the elites that want to ban farmers so that people can eat their bugs.

    I just saw an ad in Hackney about a restaurant promoting “tasty cricket superfood burger”. People with too many billions have already started their campaign

    Protect farmers or you’ll have no choice but to do as Klaus Schwab says and eat the bug

    1. Mark-Jackson Mark Jackson says:

      The statement blames it on “builders” who were working on farmland, not the farmers themselves (damage caused by third-party contractors is sadly quite common). I’d assume Gigaclear has a wayleave that allows them to run the fibre under the farmer’s land (often along the edges of fields), which is naturally where you’d also put the deep stakes for a fence. It’s unclear why the builder was not aware of the fibre.

    2. Avatar photo An Engineer says:

      You okay, hun?

    3. Avatar photo André says:

      Aaaanyway, better check your tinfoil hat. I think some 5G might be seeping in…

      (Kudos to Mark for remaining unfailingly professional)

  2. Avatar photo Gadget says:

    I’d expect to see the rush of salespersons to Gigaclear with their OTDRs

  3. Avatar photo Chris Sayers says:

    Good grief, how deep were the fence posts going, or was the cable not buried deep enough usually a fence post is not installed more than 2 foot deep, extract from Corning,

    Cable Depth: the depth at which buried cable can be placed will vary with local conditions as with the case of ‘freeze lines” (depth to which the ground freezes annually). Corning Cable Systems recommends that fiber optic cable be buried a minimum depth/cover of 30 inches (77 cm).

    Mark what’s the recommendation in your opinion?

  4. Avatar photo Jason says:

    I have a friend who works as a contractor for gigaclear and he said that the cables are buried but not to spec and some are less than 100mm deep . Apparently they are told to just get the cable in as quick as possible. So no surprises

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