Giganet Finish First Phase of FTTP Broadband Rollout in England
Fern Trading-backed UK ISP Giganet (Cuckoo) has today announced that they’ve completed the first phase of their £250 million deployment of a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, which aims to reach poorly served homes and businesses across parts of Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire in England.
Just to recap. Back in 2021 the provider pledged to build their own full fibre broadband network to 300,000 premises by the end of 2025 – across poorly served parts of Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire and West Sussex (here). But sadly today’s update makes no mention of that target and nor does it reveal how many premises they’ve actually managed to cover (Ready for Service).
Instead, we’re told that the first properties in the first areas of Eastleigh (e.g. Underwood Road), Totton (e.g. Tides Way), Tadley (e.g. Huntsmoor Road), Fawley (e.g. Southbourne Avenue), Wimborne (e.g. Cutlers Place), Ferndown (e.g. Coppice Avenue), Marlborough (e.g. Rabley Wood View) and Devizes (e.g. Longcroft Road) can now connect to the new network, which has started to go live.
Residential customers in these areas can expect to pay from £32 per month for a 150Mbps (symmetric) speed package on a 12-month term, which rises only slightly to just £40 per month for their top 900Mbps package. New customers will also benefit by getting the first 3 months of service for free. Plus there are no early exit fees or in-contract price increases.
Tristan Tavernier, Head of Design Network Build at Giganet, said:
“We’re a year into the build programme and it’s an exciting prospect that we’re now beginning to allow smaller communities to log on to hyper-fast broadband and not feel like they’ve been left behind.
At every step we’ve tried to communicate disruption as best we can and follow our mantra of being honest and transparent. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but we’re firmly on track to meet our 2024 target.”
We should point out that, in order to maximise the availability of their full fibre broadband packages, Giganet also sells to homes and businesses that have been covered by both Openreach and CityFibre’s respective FTTP networks (i.e. where they don’t overlap with their own fibre build).
The positive news comes at a time when several of Fern Trading’s full fibre networks, particularly Swish Fibre and Jurassic Fibre, appear to have been hit by a spate of redundancies. Earlier this year Fern committed to consolidate four of their networks – Jurassic Fibre, Swish Fibre, AllPoints Fibre and Giganet – into a single wholesale platform (here), albeit while informing us that redundancies were not part of that plan.
The investment group has so far declined our repeated requests to comment and, as if to cause further confusion, the Companies House details for Giganet Limited now show that Swish Trading Limited recently gained significant control over the business from Fern Fibre Limited.
UPDATE 12:30pm
We’re hearing that some of Giganet’s staff are also being impacted by redundancies.
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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Doesn’t look like they’ve done much on think broadband
Not bad for £250m of investment…… 5k homes?
As one of the affected people in the group who has been approved for VR in Swish I can only state the lies we were told with regards to the future. They even had the cheek to tell us that our jobs were safe only a few months ago to then put us at risk.
Why on earth are giganet the head of this venture….. Clearly know how to spend money with no results.
Swish have been here in Banbury since last year. Their biggest talent seems to be starting lots of work without actually finishing any of it, moving apparently randomly from street to street. They dug up our path (without informing us when the work was starting), ran a duct and 1 cable which has been strapped to 2 poles for the last 6 months. Best of all one of their sales rep(tile)s tried to tell me it was Openreach that had done the work when he was trying to get our contact details.
You can see redundancies from Giganet, Swish and Jurassic Fibre all over Linkedin!
Giganet started working in my village nearly 2 years ago and all they have achieved is installing an ugly cabinet. Swish have done similar in nearby villages, they also seem to stick an ASN on every pole going including DNO poles (do they even have an agreement for this) and then leave their equipment up for months and months with no activity.
@Big Dave: “Their biggest talent seems to be starting lots of work without actually finishing any of it, moving apparently randomly from street to street.”
There are quite number of altnets where this is true. LightSpeed Broadband comes to my mind as an example for this.
“which aims to reach poorly served homes and businesses” – If they hadn’t skipped the same streets Trooli did in my town this statement might ring true… (No one wants to touch older 70s/80s estates with the 40~50 year old ducting and Giganet are no different. And as is typical we also have the slowest FTTC and often the poorest 4G signal too.)
“Totton (e.g. Tides Way)” This is in Marchwood, not Totton.
Giganet are starting in my area of Totton from today (Larchwood Road and surrounding roads). Pity I am not WFH today so could not take a walk and see where they were.
Giganet are rapidly becoming a joke company…Have been told that all build has ceased in Tadley and might start ‘sometime in 2024’. Yeah, right.
In some nearby villages, some altnets are aiming to have FTTP available to order by mid-2024 having just started build. No valid excuses Giganet, Tadley isn’t any more challenging to undertake FTTP build than anywhere else, they have consistently over-promised and under-delivered.
Their TrustPilot reviews haven’t been exactly 5* lately, which is somewhat concerning if they ever deliver – which we’re all thinking they never will anyway