Is gigaclear worth it?

Sat 5 Sep 2020, 18:09

At the moment, if you want fibre-to-the-property rather than fibre-to-the-cabinet (where the last bit is by copper), then the two options in Charlbury will be either to used Gigaclear (or one of their resellers) when the installation is complete or to lease a private fibre connection from any of the companies that use the Openreach local network for that purpose. However, such connections are expensive to install and lease and primarily aimed at medium and large businesses and organisations (in the case below, that include the primary school).

However, on the Gigaclear network you do not get the same range of ISPs, such as Sky, TalkTalk, Plusnet, BT Retail etc.

On a technical level, the Openreach available depend on how far you are from the local green box. Basically there are two types of Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC); VDSL2 or g.fast. With VDSL2, the maximum speed available is about 80mbps for downloads and 20mbps for uploads. (Note, as will all telecoms, that's bits, not bytes per second). The speed available falls off with distance from the cabinet (and that's cable, not straight line performance). The g.fast option is able to run at up to 330mbps downstream and 50mbps upstream, but the performance falls off very much quicker with distance, and much more than about 300 metres from a cabinet, g.fast is not available at all as the signals won't go so far.

I should add that not all ISPs sell the g.fast service (or even Openreach fibre-to-the-property where it is available) and none of them ever call the services VDSL2 or g.fast. They will have some other product name. For instance, Talktalk sell a version of the Openreach 160mbps g.fast service but call it "Fast 150 fibre".

Note also that all the ISPs reselling the Openreach products can only advertise speeds that the great majority of consumers will experience hence TalkTalk have a produce called "superfast fibre" than uses the 80mbps FTTC product but is advertised as 67 mbps.

One thing that the ISPs never seem to tell you with their FTTC and g.fast products, is that the internal extension phone wiring in a house can have a dramatic effect on the performance. That's even if you put microfilters everywhere. The best way to check is to plug the router into the test socket under modern Openreach master sockets and if it's drastically different to a normal speed test then people can often achieve much better performance by optimising their internal phone wiring (a bit too complex to go into here). Another issue, especially in old, stone built houses is the effect on WiFi which can ruins broad band performance. So, my advice, is if you have slow broadband is to make sure it's running at the speed the supplier says it should, and if it is not, it might be due to WiFi or extension phone wiring issues.

So, if you want anything faster than the Openreach products, then at the moment, it's either that private leased line (expensive) or Gigaclear, albeit their prices depend on speed.

I should add that Openreach are gradually expanding fibre-to-the-property, and especially on new build developments (I don't know if the new builds in Chalbury have that option). However, retro-fitting of fibre-to-the-property is an expensive and time-consuming business (as you can tell from what Gigaclear are having to do). It's a bit easier for Openreach as there is a certain amount of ducting which already has fibre in it to feed those green boxes. However, the bit to individual properties can be a very different matter. I doubt that there's a fibre-to-the-property deployment planned by Openreach for Charlbury in the immediate future, but you never know.

New builds are a bit different though as it's just as easy to install fibre as copper.

Apologies for the length of all this...