Rural UK ISP Gigaclear boosts customers broadband speeds for GTA6 launch
Abingdon-based alternative internet provider Gigaclear, which has built their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband network across various rural parts of England, have automatically and temporarily boosted eligible customers’ broadband speeds to the “maximum their router supports“, at no extra cost, to support the launch of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto VI video game.
Pre-loading of GTA VI began yesterday, with the full game coming in at around 212 GigaBytes (varying a bit between platforms), thus Gigaclear have already begun the gradual process of upgrading the speeds of 175,000+ customers and this is due to complete by 16th November 2026, well ahead of launch day.
This means customers on speeds from 100Mbps to 400Mbps could see their speeds jump to as much as 500Mbps, while many of those on 600Mbps packages could reach up to 900Mbps depending on their equipment. Those already on 900Mbps are already at the maximum speed, so won’t see a change (clearly they’re not yet ready to promote the new 3Gbps tier).
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Nathan Rundle, CEO of Gigaclear, said:
“After thirteen years of waiting, GTA VI is finally almost here, and I know just how much excitement there is around this launch. Millions of Brits are gearing up to head to Vice City, with some even booking the day off work to get stuck in.
But with downloads of up to 212GB, the last thing anyone wants is for their long-awaited day off to be wasted staring at a progress bar. So, we’re giving our customers the closest thing to a real-life cheat code: a free speed boost, applied automatically, so they can get game-ready without lifting a finger.
Where you live still decides how long you wait and too often, the rural communities have been left in the slow lane. We know how important fast, reliable broadband is for gamers, particularly in rural communities where it’s not always been easy to come by. We want our customers to enjoy every minute of one of the biggest gaming moments of the decade, spending less time on the loading screen and more time playing.”
The free upgrade will stay in place for the game’s launch on 19th November.
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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They might be able to make use of it too. Despite my earlier skepticism about Sony’s servers my PS5 downloaded that bad boy in 33 minutes which suggests an average download speed of about 850 Mbps.
Sadly they can’t boost the 900Mbps customer to 3Gbps as the backend system required is seperate from the legacy products with no current migration tool available to Customer Operations. The Playstation and Xbox servers did perform really well through the initial pre-load. All 3 consoles in my house downloaded the game at full speed on all 3 machines at the time. Only time I think I’ll ever saturate the 3Gbps…
Very nice gesture – pity they didn’t consider the fact you can indeed as the previous commenter mentioned, preload it ahead of release. I did the same yesterday, my Xbox Series X had it done in around half and hour, 850Mbps plus with it hitting 940 fairly regularly whenever I checked on it. The irony being that my internet is actually faster, the Xbox is the limit here with its 1Gbps connection but still half an hour was great.
200 Mbit/s doubled to 400 Mbit/s here, not quite the maximum the router supports but I am not complaining.
consoles are limited to 1gbit anyway and have weak wifi chips