Surprisingly, there now appear to be two companies drawing up plans to supply Alpington and Yelverton with full fibre hyperfast broadband, and this post gives some information and updates on the situation.
Since we published our previous posts on County Broadband’s plan to bring hyperfast full fibre broadband to the village, you might have seen a flyer in the post from GigaClear, another company seeming to offer a similar product. Which was a surprise to the Parish Council, to me, and presumably anyone else in the village who has been following the project.
The Parish Council have been making enquiries to clarify the situation, and have made contact with the GigaClear manager responsible for the area. We wanted to pass on the information so that you are kept up to date.
- County Broadband does not have the monopoly on providing fibre for our parish, hence Gigaclear’s intention to investigate and offer a fibre service too.
- Gigaclear does not require a minimum number of customers to subscribe before they proceed, unlike County Broadband indicated they would.
- Gigaclear will have a proposed design for our parish by the end of the year and this will then be reviewed internally for approval. After this, they could put the scheme into their construction schedule. There is no indication of when this might be, yet.
- Gigaclear is keen to provide a service to us, they are currently working in Poringland and other local villages.
- The Manager will keep in touch and provide updates. And we will pass those on to residents with subsequent posts.
Both providers are companies with a track record of bringing fibre broadband to rural and urban locations and both are drawing up plans and gauging interest in our area.
GigaClear’s website offers a facility to register your interest, which is what the flyer mentioned. This can be done here, it’s just a form with your address, no payment or commitment. It would probably make them more likely to speed things up if loads of us expressed an interest.
https://gigaclear.com/home-broadband
As we said in previous posts, the Parish Council expressed their support for the County Broadband plan, because it would of course be good for the village to have more reliable broadband. Now it looks like there’s a second provider who is serious about providing a service and has a similar plan.
So it seems appropriate to give GigaClear the same level of exposure on this website, to let you know there are two options, either of which may be taken forward if there is deemed to be enough interest.
We’ll keep you updated on any further developments.
Alpington and Yelverton 