Giganet Name 5 More Hampshire Areas for FTTP Broadband Build
Fern Trading-backed UK broadband ISP Giganet (Cuckoo), which is currently investing £250m to build a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband across parts of Southern England, has this week unveiled a new batch of five locations in Hampshire to benefit from their ongoing deployment.
The operator’s current plan is to cover a total of 300,000 premises across poorly served parts of Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire and West Sussex (here). As part of that they’ve already announced builds for locations such as Wimborne, Ferndown, Ringwood, Fordingbridge, Henfield, Hurstpierpoint, Hythe, Totton, Fair Oak, Tadley, Marlborough and Devizes.
However, this week Giganet confirmed that their deployment in Hampshire alone was expected to cover a total of 114,500 premises (equating to a spend of £125m from their budget), which will also include the addition of five new locations to the existing plan: Winchester, Marchwood, Fawley, Emsworth and Eastleigh.
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A number of civil engineering contractors will be helping to deliver the build in Hampshire, such as Gridworx, Fibre First, GE Services, 4 Site Fibre, Future Network Inc and STL. Overall, their deployment in the county is expected to finish sometime in 2024 (the first services will go live before then).
Kevin Barry, Giganet’s Chief Network Build Officer, said (Daily Echo):
“This is an exciting chapter for Giganet as we bring Hampshire’s smaller communities up to speed with full fibre services. Over the last few years there’s been a surge in demand for faster, more reliable broadband. For us this also means providing customers with an offering that’s grounded in honesty and simplicity – from flexible contracts to no exit fees.
While we can expect some short-term disruption from the build, this will benefit the local area tremendously in the long-term. Large or small, we’re connecting communities and making sure that no one is left behind.”
On top of that, the operator is also continuing to expand the availability of FTTP via Openreach and CityFibre’s respective wholesale platforms in other parts of the country, which helps to maximise their overall network availability. We hope to have a more comprehensive build update from Giganet in the very near future.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Finally!
Wonder if there is granularity to their locations, Winchester is quite a big area! And I can walk to the giganet offices within a couple of minutes from my house.
Yeah… Does Winchester include the surrounding villages such as Kings Worthy, South Wonston or Sutton Scotney?
Indeed, or the well known Winchester village, Whiteley ;-). Just me being selfish of course. Wonder if giganet have a nice rollout map like toob do?
Its interesting they’ve officially added Fawley/Marchwood which are either side of Hythe to the rollout now. They’ve been building in all 3 towns/villages for a long while now. They haven’t been doing much in most of Hythe for a while which I take as a good sign that the area is nearly done (It was originally supposed to be ready this month when I contact them back in July). There is lots happening in Marchwood/Fawley area.
BTW all those asking about statuses check out bidb.uk – I’m not affiliated in anyway but great site to see what providers are digging in your area.
Hopefully GigaNET can improve their network resilience after the problems they had related to the Brighton Hill Roundabout incident earlier this year.
Worst company in the alt net space. Build no homes, piggy back Openreach nationwide to claim their national. Bought another joke of a company to look bigger.
Could you explain your comment with details? I have an option between Giganet or Trooli coming up (this year I hope) and with no sign BT have even planned for my town to get fiber I will be taking one as long line FTTC genuinely is rubbish. The common experience I’ve seen in the forums here is Giganet is generally regarded as better than Trooli (You can use your own equipment for example) but I would like to hear if there are genuine issues? (or is this just a rant?). I know Giganet have slipped on when our area will come online but so have Trooli…
I would be interested in Giganet if it got established in Winchester the Fullflood
area is severely lacking in reliable connection.
Do you have a planned completion date for the works in Tadley?