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The Essex County Council (ECC) in England has this afternoon confirmed that they’ve settled their legal dispute with Abingdon-based UK broadband ISP Gigaclear, which was originally raised last summer (here) over an alleged failure by the network operator to deliver on their contracted Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) build.
Just to recap. The situation in Essex concerned Gigaclear’s earlier contracts under the previous Government’s Superfast Broadband (SFBB) programme, which was managed at a local level by the council with support from the Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency. As we recall, Gigaclear held several of these contracts, such as Phase 2b (part of Epping Forest), Phase 3.1 (Uttlesford), Phase 3.2 (Braintree, Colchester) and Phase 4a.1 (Epping Forest).
However, as we’ve reported in the past, Gigaclear did face some sizeable delivery delays to a number of their rural broadband roll-out contracts a few years ago, which wasn’t just a problem in Essex but also affected similar contracts in other counties too (e.g. Devon and Somerset – here, where the contracts were eventually scrapped). But some local authorities, like Essex, were more tolerant and accepted some delay.
Nevertheless, the situation appeared to boil up again last summer after reports indicated that the ECC had launched court proceedings against the ISP for breach of contract, while claiming that three of their four build contracts remain unfulfilled – these were expected to bring Gigaclear’s FTTP network to more than 10,000 rural premises. But apparently a small portion of this had not been reached (c.400 premises in the Braintree, Colchester, Epping Forest and Uttlesford districts).
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