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Abingdon-based alternative rural gigabit broadband ISP Gigaclear, which has already deployed their full fibre (FTTP) network to cover 600,000 premises (mostly in remote rural parts of England), sadly appears to have suffered another round of redundancies over the past few weeks.
The provider, which is home to a customer base of 150,000 (i.e. 25% take-up, with a goal of reaching 29% by the end of this financial year), last suffered a noticeable level of redundancies back in September 2024 (here). This was partly fuelled by the same strains as many other network builders are continuing to experience (i.e. high interest rates, rising build costs and a highly competitive environment).
The last round of job cuts also came as part of Gigaclear’s plan for the “next stage of its development” and a “re-focus on ultra-rural areas“ (i.e. their state aid backed project gigabit roll-out), while at the same time placing greater focus on commercialisation. Sadly, the current market continues to be under many of the same strains as before, and the provider has reportedly also been on the hunt for fresh funding while slowing their build (here).
The above context may help to explain why, over the past few weeks, ISPreview has noted a sudden increase in the number of staff – mostly from their network build teams – now announcing themselves as being made redundant (#opentowork) via Linkedin and other popular employment platforms. But the exact scale of this remains unclear.
As the CEO of Gigaclear, Nathan Rundle, said earlier this month (here): “We’ve definitely been refocusing our build to go ultra-rural, which means the deployment is slower than it was, and we’re using a lot more BDUK [public] money, while being really clear around those investment cases. I think the current funding climate, as every altnet knows, is tough and ultimately deploying large amounts of capital at the moment isn’t necessarily a logical thing to do.”
Despite this, the provider retains their original aspiration for reaching “over” 1 million UK premises, although at present it remains unclear whether that will be delivered via new build or consolidation with other networks.
Ben Woods, Gigaclear’s Chief Operating Officer (COO), said:
“Gigaclear is offering some employees the opportunity to apply for voluntary redundancy as part of an ongoing review of our build plans for the remainder of 2025 and into 2026.
I would like to extend my thanks to all our colleagues for their commitment and contribution and emphasise that these redundancies are purely voluntary.
As we move forward, our focus remains on bringing more customers onto the network and reinforcing our position as the UK’s leading provider of full fibre broadband to rural communities.”
At this point it’s worth remembering that building Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) infrastructure into remote rural communities has always been an extremely slow, expensive and complex challenge – particularly for a commercial operator like Gigaclear.
Put another way, it’s impressive that commercial providers like this have been able to do it to such a scale, and it remains sensible for them to focus more on delivering their Project Gigabit contracts in order to avoid past problems (they’ve previously struggled to deliver on some of their state aid backed deployments, such as for Devon and Somerset).