Gigaclear Earmarks 6,000 More Rural Properties For 1Gbps Broadband

Fibre to the Premise (FTTP) network provider Gigaclear has secured an additional £6.5m in funding to extend its service to 6,000 more homes and businesses in rural areas, offering speeds of up to 1Gbps.

The company already operates 17 rural fibre networks and is building 20 more across Oxfordshire, Kent, Rutland, Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire.

It says it now has a “pipeline” of several hundred rural communities looking for ultrafast and reliable broadband and says the new funding will allow it to expand its service will allow it to meet growing demand.

Rural gigabit network

“With strong support from existing and new shareholders, we will meet the record demand we are seeing for our transformational broadband,” says Matthew Hare, chief executive of Gigaclear. “Rural communities across the UK realise that they can leapfrog a whole generation of technology with a new, ultrafast, pure fibre network that can scale to thousands of megabits per second, future proofing the communities for many, many years and allowing them, even today, to reap benefits not yet available to many towns and cities in the UK.

“We are already putting this new investment to work, building new networks and serving thousands of homes and businesses.”

Most of the UK’s fibre infrastructure is based on Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) technology, which uses copper for the final few metres of the connection. A number of operators offer FTTP connections, however these are mostly restricted to urban areas.

Virgin Media last week announced plans to expand its cable network to four million more properties as part of a £3 billion investment. However it is expected that the majority of locations earmarked for the rollout will either be in cities or places already served by BT.

The UK government’s Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) programme aims to connect 95 percent of the UK population to superfast broadband by 2017, and has so far connected more than two million properties.

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