ISP Rutland Telecom (RT), which specialises in bringing faster internet access into some of the UK's most remote rural communities, has today revealed more details about its new partnership with Gigaclear and their plans to blanket Rutland with fibre optic broadband services.

ISPreview.co.uk now understands that the deal, which last week saw Gigaclear making a "substantial investment" in RT (here), will begin with the deployment of a full Fibre-to-the-Home ( FTTH ) fibre optic broadband network in the rural village of Hambleton. This follows on from last year's related news (here).


Sadly Rutland Telecom still sees a serious problem with the "lack of a level playing field in subloop unbundling (SLU)", particularly when compared to BT's own GEA-FTTC (up to 40Mbps) product. This, they claim, prevents them from being able to offer competitively priced services.


The issue of FTTC pricing is becoming an increasingly hot topic, especially after Ofcom effectively allowed BT a greater hold over their new fibre-based products in return for making a significant investment into the country's future infrastructure. BT is currently investing £2.5bn so that 66% of the UK population will have access to its Next Generation Access (NGA) broadband services ( FTTC and FTTP ) by 2015.

So far not a single third-party ISP has been able to match the FTTC prices being offered by BT Retail and its sibling PlusNet UK.