Oxfordshire: Britain’s fastest ultrafast broadband trialled by Gigaclear

Ultrafast pure fibre broadband provider Gigaclear has launched Britain’s fastest internet package for retail customers, with residents in Oxford the first to trial the 5Gbps service. The H5G and B5G packages, for home and business customers, offer download speeds up to 200 times faster and upload speeds 1,000 times faster than the UK average 1. Up until now only the UK’s largest organisations have been able to have such speeds.

A small selection of residents in Oxfordshire who expressed an interest have been chosen by Gigaclear as the first to trial the service, which will be available to all customers from early 2016 through Gigaclear’s existing fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network. The ultrafast service significantly reduces the time taken to upload and download large files. For example, to download a 1,500MB video can take up to eight minutes on an average UK broadband service. This improves to two minutes on Gigaclear’s 100Mbps service, but will take between just four and six seconds with the new 5Gbps package.

Matthew Hare, chief executive at Gigaclear, said: “A handful of our customers in Oxfordshire have been the very first people in the UK to experience this ‘hyperfast’ broadband speed. The 5Gbps package is a premium service that gives the fastest Internet speeds in the country to those on our networks who want the best connection possible.

“While some may argue that it is beyond what the average homeowner needs, it won’t be long before there’s a greater requirement for a 5Gbps service among all our customers as connectedness becomes an ever more important part of our everyday lives.  By launching the trial of this 5Gbps service in the region, we are demonstrating to all our customers that we have delivered a future proofed network that won’t need to be updated even as their usage massively increases in the years to come.”

All the signs are that UK consumers will need this level of service soon. Internet usage in the UK has increased fivefold over the past five years and is predicted to increase threefold over the coming five years, according to research from the Cisco Visual Networking Index™.   Internet traffic is expected to grow by 23 per cent each year through to 20192

Hare continued: “By 2019 Cisco estimate that there will be three-times as many online devices on the planet as there are humans!  People will need significant bandwidth to live and work the way they want.  The beauty of our approach is that the pure fibre we are putting into the ground today will support that future. Any Gigaclear customer will be able to access this service without having to change a thing other than the electronics at the end of the fibre.”