COMMUNICA | Issue Five
TWO years ago, the Daily Telegraph
compared Gigaclear to the big players, such
as BT Openreach and Virgin Media.
It told the story of our early days starting in 2010,
when our founder, Matthew Hare, was a sole trader.
It went on to document our evolution and how our
growth since then has been astonishing. The speed
at which we deploy our network is increasing with
every passing year.
At the heart of our business, and a major reason for
our growth, is the struggle that UK rural communities
face with sub-par connectivity - we strongly believe
that they are entitled to access the fastest speeds
in the country, rather than miss out just because of
where they happen to live.
The simple fact is that a lack of connectivity has
a detrimental impact on the growth of the UK
economy, severely hindering local businesses and
the day-to-day lives of those in rural areas.
Whilst we are now seeing a shift towards prioritising
Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP), we have a long
journey ahead of us in order to connect all 4.2million
rural properties in the UK onto a full fibre network.
The telecoms industry has barely scraped the
surface so far, but that’s rapidly changing as
businesses like ours get faster and more efficient.
The Gigaclear journey
So how did we get here? Living in rural Oxfordshire,
Matthew saw the problems that rural homes and
businesses had in getting access to fast, reliable
internet connections.
The problems stemmed from the very long lengths
of copper cables in rural areas but were made worse
by the fact that other network operators chose to
focus investment on towns and cities where the
majority of their customers were located.
Having sold his previous communications business,
24 |
he saw the opportunity to use new full fibre network
technologies, where distance has no impact on
performance, to deliver an FTTP service with speeds
of up to 1,000Mbps (1Gbps).
Our first FTTP deployments were in the communities
of Appleton, Eaton and Besselsleigh in Oxfordshire.
The overwhelmingly positive response from these
communities as we rolled out our service was
evidence enough to illustrate the positive impact that
fast internet access could have on the lives of those
living and working in these rural areas.
Since then, we’ve gone from strength to strength.
In 2014, we secured our first government subsidised
project to build a full fibre network to communities in
West Oxfordshire.
This was subsequently opened by the Prime Minister
(and local MP at the time,) David Cameron.
He praised our efforts, commenting that locals
suddenly had better broadband than he had in
Downing Street.
He said: “This is a great advertisement of how a
small community can come together with the help
of the Government’s Rural Community Broadband
Fund to get some of the fastest broadband in the
country brought directly to their homes.
“A huge congratulations to all involved and I would
encourage everyone to take up this opportunity.”
“David Cameron praised
our efforts - locals had
better broadband than he
did in Downing Street”