Broadband ISP Gigaclear Tops 100k Users and 500k UK Premises Passed
Abingdon-based ISP Gigaclear, which specialises in deploying their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network into rural parts England, has today announced that their network now covers 500,000 premises (ready for service) and they’ve also grown their customer base to 100,000 (up from 95k on 22nd Feb 2024).
The internet provider is principally owned by major investor Infracapital, together with Equitix and Railpen. The company previously had investment commitments estimated to be worth up to around £1.1bn (here), but at the end of last year they also secured a new £1.5bn debt facility (here) and recently won the £16.6m Project Gigabit rollout contract for East Gloucestershire (here).
The figures serve to underline the significant growth Gigaclear has undergone during the past three-and-a-half years, having begun 2021 with 36,000 customers and 140,000 homes and businesses able to connect.
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Nathan Rundle, Gigaclear’s CEO, said:
“It’s about giving people choice, something many of those living in small, often hard-to-reach rural communities currently don’t have. Our full fibre broadband fundamentally changes many of the communities we go to because it enables people to decide how they want to work and how they want to live their lives. It’s a choice many don’t have until we come along.”
Gigaclear’s 100,000th customer was named as the Austin family from rural Gloucestershire. Oh, and there’s a video..
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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Well done Gigaclear! A 20% takeup so far but hopefully that’ll increase as fixed terms come to an end elsewhere.
Looking forward to them going live in my village.
It would be good if the networks also gave figures for take up that exclude recent deployments say for installs of 2 years plus. You would get a more a realistic view of how they are doing.
Well done Gigaclear!
It’s a shame some local authorities haven’t always co-operated effectively with this company to develop FTTP networks.
‘Local concerns’ have often taken precedence!
The contracts signed for Project Gigabit have used Gigaclear sparingly, which is a bit suspicious!
That’s, ahem, somewhat of a misrepresentation of what happened with the CDS contract. Stunning mismanagement by both parties.
I’m guessing that after that, other BDUK agencies were a little cautious.
Maybe they would get/keep more subscribers if the end of contract pricing was lower? Will be coming off contract soon and have been quoted 2.5 times the current tie in price. Real shame as the service is good….looking at a a 5g modem instead as this is now live in my area and can get 400+
Have you not tried negotiating? I haven’t heard of them not improving the price when asked yet.
It’s just a fact of life that sometimes you have to ask for what you want….