Is gigaclear worth it?

Thu 6 Aug 2020, 13:45

Hello everyone. I have just been pointed in the direction of this thread and I hope I might be able to clarify a few things for people who are concerned about Gigaclear, their operations and those of their contractors, as well as the broadband services available to customers.

I can speak with a good deal of experience as I was the one who set up Cotswolds Broadband CIC and developed the investment model with central government through Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) and West Oxfordshire District Council to create the country's first 100% superfast broadband enabled district. Prior to that I co-authored the County's Broadband Plan and worked with Transition Chipping Norton having obtained a grant from the Big Society Broadband programme administered by the Independent Networks Co-operative Association to develop a “proof of concept” for a new rural superfast broadband network centred on the town of Chipping Norton

To be clear, I am not part of Gigaclear and I sold Cotswolds Broadband to them in 2016, so that they could continue the work that I started, since they had the capital and backing of institutional investors, as well as numerous contracts with councils around the country to develop a future proof broadband network for the UK.

Having said all that, I am not entirely happy with the way Gigaclear have let the civils contracts in our area, and nor are WODC. The work needs a lot of remedial action and reinstatement works, but unfortunately that is the nature of this sort of thing and I'm afraid utility works do cause inevitable disruption. In this instance the disruption has been greater than anticipated, and digging up the road/pavement a second time is not unknown!

I appreciate that not everyone will want 300Mbps broadband today or even next year, but as Internet connectivity becomes more ubiquitous and we rely on it for business and leisure use, bandwidth demand grows exponentially. The ability to connect to ultrafast fibre Internet can only be provided via a new network, as the ageing BT copper network will ultimately be switched off - something BT themselves acknowledge as an inevitability within 10 or so years. Having the ability to take up the service doesn't mean that you have to, but it is there when you need it. As a side note here, there are wireless broadband operators providing services locally, but I'm afraid they are not so reliable as a fibre-optic cable to your home or place of work, and VOIP does not work consistently well over a wireless 'last mile', which is after all, connected to fibre beyond that.

As others have said, Gigaclear's network is Open Access (as I wrote into the contract with WODC and BDUK), meaning that other operators can sell services over it, but few have done so, since the margins offered are very low.

I have a service from Gigaclear and I have found it reliable 99.9% of the time, with a couple of occasions when unscheduled outages have meant I needed to use my mobile connection instead. What I have found when working in the broadband game is that many people blame their broadband connection when it turns out to be their Wi-Fi stability that is in question (that isn't meant to be shifting the blame BTW!). The Gigaclear Linksys router is not something I would recommend. Also, my installation was not without incident and took 12 months longer than scheduled to have it connected, but the benefit far outweighs that inconvenience.

I can't address all the comments from others individually and I am not a representative of the operator or their contractors, but I would be more than happy to discuss any aspect of broadband deployment and the technologies used, as well as help to find the right solution for individuals.