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Gigaclear delivers Gigabit in Appleton, Oxfordshire
Saturday 08 September 2012 12:21:27 by Andrew Ferguson

Prior to 2012 the UK never featured on FTTH/FTTB statistics, but as companies and community groups across the UK start to connect properties and service IP traffic over the links this should be changing.

Today sees Gigaclear running a demonstration of their FTTP service at the Appleton Village Hall, that ran from 10am to 12:30. The purpose being to demonstrate what is possible with a connection that can run at up to 1000 Mbps, and answer all important questions from those households about to be connected. We understand that the first properties are live with the service, so this is not just a demonstration link installed but the delivery of service that should see 400 properties hooked up to the full fibre solution.

Gigaclear installs to the boundary of every property of the communities it operates in, and then the choice of how to connect is up to the householder, the basic connection fee of £100 covers the Fibre router and up to 50m of drop fibre. The home owner can trench this in themselves, pay a third party (e.g. www.boxcomngn.net £85 for up to 25m) or alternatively get Gigaclear to install this final drop of up to 50m which costs £500.

Symmetric Reserved Speed Burst speed Monthly Price
10 Mbps 1000 Mbps £37
20 Mbps 1000 Mbps £62
30 Mbps 1000 Mbps £82
40 Mbps 1000 Mbps £97
50 Mbps 1000 Mbps £112
100 Mbps 1000 Mbps £195

The pricing may seem expensive, but when you consider there is no requirement to retain a PSTN telephone line to have this service (saving of £8 to 15 a month), and if happy with no battery backup during power failures the service can replace telephone services by utilising VoIP. Also the concept of buying reserved bandwidth with burst options, is how most interconnects and hosting services operate, and if one were to describe most ADSL/ADSL2+ services in this manner we would be quoting speeds of 0.05 to 0.15 Mbps bursting to line speed, where only 10% exceed a line speed of 16 Mbps.

Appleton is located a few miles south west of Oxford, and was a well known not/slow spot, and also appears to suffer intermittent mobile coverage. So even if someone purchases the 10 Mbps service, they will be impressed with the world of opportunity this opens up, and with a Gigabit of burst speed you do not need long to download a 4GB HD movie, just 32 seconds.

The fastest country in Europe will not be an overnight transformation, but projects like this are part of the puzzle.

Update 4pm: www.appletonbroadband.co.uk/home is a dedicated site for residents of Appleton wanting to know more about the available service.

[ Topic: Broadband | 23 comments | link to this item ]

Comments

Posted by Apilar 9 months ago
Fair usage? Caps?
Posted by herdwick 9 months ago
"Just £37/mo with no usage limits"

"Gigaclear provides web based support as standard. Telephone support is available as an optional extra."

"Most Gigaclear accounts do not have a usage cap. If your account has a cap, then when you reach the cap your service will be restricted. Otherwise, jump right in, the water’s warm!"
Posted by cyberdoyle 9 months ago
Fantastic stuff, Altnets are definitely part of the puzzle.
Gigaclear will prove that its possible for rural people to have a decent connection too. Instead of being throttled and capped for infinity. These are the sort of businesses who should get support from the government to do the villages even they can't reach. Or parish pumps should be available so gigaclear et al could reach even more people.
Posted by lucifa42 9 months ago
Hopefully this company will run this out to Southmoor, just 4 miles away and regularly featured in the top20 not-spots in Britain.
Posted by Somerset 9 months ago
Good stuff, but do the overheads reduce the effective speed below 1G?
Posted by GMAN99 9 months ago
cyberdoyle, where else are they doing apart from on their own doorstep. If its commercially viable in their area why can't they do it elsewhere, why is government support needed?
Posted by leexgx 9 months ago
the bust speed part is that seconds or min burst how does that work
Posted by jumpmum 9 months ago
Leexgx. The Reserved speed is what you get all the time, the burst is what you can get if no-one else is using it. ie contended with everybody else. So a download will run at a min of 10Mbps, but may run up to 1000Mbps if the capacity is spare. Only if the site the other end will deliver 1000Mbps of course which is very unlikely!!
Posted by undecidedadrian 9 months ago
@CD last time I checked Infinity wasn't capped and the throttling is only on p2p traffic, hardly restrictive.

I would still keep a phone line even if hooked up to this system as there is just the time that you need to contact emergency services and in a power cut.
Posted by leexgx 9 months ago
so its like 100:1 ratio (1000mb max speed min speed 10mb if every one is hammering it ) I guess users who have payed for higher min speeds get priority over the lower min speed users
Posted by raybellis 9 months ago
@lucifa42 Gigaclear have a page collecting expressions of interest from Kingston Bagpuize and Southmoor residents at <http://www.gigaclear.com/communities/kingston-bagpuize-southmoor/>
Posted by undecidedadrian 9 months ago
Do we know what kit they supply as a lot of "gigabit" routers can only cope at approx 300megabit/sec due to limits on CPU used.

Also a home network will now have to be fully uprated to allow for the higher burst speeds and then after that not all devices come with gigabit built in.

Perhaps gigaclear knows this and is relying on most devices still being 10/100 so the network isn't saturated.
Posted by andrew (Favicon staff member) 9 months ago
Routers have come a long way, current Asus I am playing with breaks the 300 Meg barrier by a large margin
Posted by KarlAustin 9 months ago
But does it do so when there are 100s of connections established? That's where a lot of routers fall down, and lets face it, at the moment the only real use for these much much higher speeds is torrents (legal or otherwise) which create 100s or 1000s of TCP sessions.
Posted by andrew (Favicon staff member) 9 months ago
The Asus claims 30,000 connection support, and with 256MB RAM seems capable of this
Posted by otester 9 months ago
According to comments on their website they seem open to expansion if outlying villages band together and show there is interest, contact your parish councils and get them to interest.
Posted by leexgx 9 months ago
even the e3200 i think can do 500-600mb/s (Wan-Lan, lan-wan or combined total) guess need an router that's an PC to get full speed unless they provide one that can do full 1000mb
Posted by w0067814 9 months ago
Congratulations to Matthew and the Gigaclear team!

I can confirm that the network does indeed provide the 1Gb/s throughput. A very impressive demo at the village hall.

They had various displays including several Samsung HD Smart TVs streaming movies, a "dumb" which had been enabled by a Boxee, plus a YouView box , Sonos, and an Xbox 360. In addition to this there was a PC performing speed tests using www.speedtest.net which consistently returned over 950Mb/s.
Posted by w0067814 9 months ago
I'm surprised that people above are talking about contention ratios when they don't know what the level of backhaul is. Dividing the EIR by the CIR on a customer drop doesn't give contention ratio!

I can say that their backhaul is just as impressive as their customer tails, and the contention ratio on the full 1Gb/s is less than most other ISPs on a much lower headline speed.
Posted by GMAN99 9 months ago
Well done Gigaclear, can't say I'd need so much speed but I wouldn't say no either :)

An altnet producing visible results, good stuff.
Posted by herdwick 9 months ago
@w0067814 so what is the backhaul then ?
Posted by digitaldales 8 months ago
@herdwick backhaul, as I understand it, is currently 10Gig and can be increased to suit the community usage as this becomes apparent over time.

Posted by chrysalis 5 months ago
yeah this is been done properly, amazing what gets achieved so points as to why openreach cant do full 1000/1000 burst on their FTTP.
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