Several of us from Tresham attended a meeting at Hillesley yesterday evening where Mark of Fastershire (a partnership organisation of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire) and Steve Harris of Gigaclear (the fibre optic network installer) brought us up to date with the rollout.

It is important to realise that this new fibre optic infrastructure will provide an ‘ultrafast’ (up to 1000 Mbps, ‘up’ and ‘down’) ‘broadband’ connection to the internet and is completely separate from the BT telephone network. The BT network uses a copper wire to carry telephone signals but is unsuited to carrying internet data – for example here in Tresham we only get speeds of up to 4 Mbps. You can still keep your old phone system with BT or you can do away with it and use the internet to carry your ‘landline’ phone calls (a process called Voice Over Internet Protocol or VOIP) as well as your data.

Some residents in Tresham use a wireless system provided by Voneus (it used to be Cotswold Wireless) which provides speeds of ~25Mbps, and is relayed across from Leighterton via aerials on Tom Hatherell’s barns. This system is still available and will probably be cheaper than fibre, though perhaps not as reliable.

Back to the rollout of fibre: Gigaclear are now saying they hope to start in ‘the third quarter’ and that it should take up to 9 months to go live. We are in Upper Kilcott (South West) area which includes Didmarton and Hillesley. So with luck we should see it in place and working by this time next year. They will contact households before they start ‘the dig’. I think they will probably bring it in from the A46 but it might come up from Hillesley, along the verge where possible or under the road where necessary. They use a company called Complete Utilities to do the work – you may have seen their equipment in other villages. There will be one or two small cabinets in the village from where individual fibre optic cables are run to a Point of Termination (POT) outside each property: a POT is just a flat plate in the verge or road. All of the work to this stage will have been paid for by Fastershire, i.e. householders pay nothing to have the POT put outside their house. It is at this point that you can decide to sign up with an Internet Service Provider to provide a broadband service; there will be several ISPs to choose from including BT, Voneus and Gigaclear themselves who also offer a service. Once you have entered into a contract with an ISP, included in the ‘activation’ fee of some £30 is the work (which will actually be done by Gigaclear) to bring the fibre from the POT into your house.  On top of that, as at present, there is a monthly contract fee.

You can find more information at http://gigaclear.net , contact the Gigaclear Network Build Care team on 01865 591137 or email them at Please switch on JavaScript to see our email address .

Write a Comment if you think we need to have a village meeting to discuss this further.

Richard Goodenough