Truespeed VS Gigaclear

Hi, my community are looking into these two providers potentially coming to the area and asked me to provide a simple comparison so we can decide together which is best.

Is anyone able to help with this as I find it most unclear?

You might want to ask both suppliers to come to visit a group of you and explain what they have to offer. I have had a Gigaclear service for the past 3 years, and it works very well. I have not heard of Truespeed.
Gigaclear are much more established. If you asked both how many customers they have that would give you and idea of their sizes and experience.

You need to have an idea of how many properties you expect to reach. The challenge is to get enough people to sign up for a viable project. Where I live in a semi rural area, Gigaclear wanted something like 30% of just over 600 properties to sign.

The Gigaclear network is underground and terminates on a property boundary. The customer has to pay for the cost or running a cable from the boundary to a suitable point inside the property. The work can be done by anyone including the customer themselves.

You can also learn from B4RN, but they do have a different 'DIY' appraoch.

There is some background to Truespeed here

Thank you for the link.

One issue I did not mention is what to do about phone calls. Gigaclear have a relationship with Vonage which can help those who don't want to install their own Voip equipment. I ported my landline number to Voipfone who I did find very helpful with a technical issue I had. I don't have battery backup, in an emergency I would use my mobile phone and maybe my car.

I do wonder about the viability of both companies if BT ever decides to discontinue their copper network as they would have to overbuild.

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

I do wonder about the viability of both companies if BT ever decides to discontinue their copper network as they would have to overbuild.

The altnets have a 10-year head start in terms of customer acquisition and building customer loyalty and satisfaction. They also generally offer higher speeds and lower prices.

So if BT comes along to those areas they'll simply find the market already sewn up. I suppose they could choose to buy those companies up, but then they'd be left with a different network architecture to support and different product set to migrate.

No decisions have been made to withdraw the copper network yet and a number of years notice would need to be given of that intent.

I'm in Chew Valley, and appear to have a choice between these two.
Gigaclear are more established, have public money to fill in specified broadband gaps. Truespeed are very new, have a ton of private investment money and are targeting specific areas where they sense a market.

After 2 years of GC saying 'coming soon', I got bored and asked Openreach for a quote for FTTP (£18k for a 18 property install), which I didn't take up. TS came along and said 'if you persuade 1/3 of your community to sign a contract we'll build to every property for a £150 install each'. I did this in Jan/Dec, and they are building now with an expected connection in August.

TS are young, their pre-sales service isn't great, but those who have the symmetric guaranteed 200Mb product are thrilled. I hear of some teething issues with install dates slipping, billing, tech support and the quality of the wifi in their router (but who uses the [censored] wifi supplied by the vendor anyway?).

I can't wait for TS, and their business model of getting a community to club together to bring them in, also seems to make a good spirit for sorting out post-install issues and having a community voice back to them. I am a community champion for TS in my hamlet, and am in touch with other champions in the Chew Valley area.

I will add that I work in IT and a colleague of mine, who I rate highly for his technical proficiency in IT infrastructure engineering left our organisation to work for TS - he's betting his family's livelihood on them!

Patrick

Edited by syncropatrick (Fri 01-Jun-18 14:22:00)

In reply to a post by syncropatrick:

. . . but those who have the synchronous guaranteed 200Mb product are thrilled. . . .

I believe the word you intended to type is symmetric.

Ta. I thought I was having a brainfart when I wrote that.
Original post corrected.

Edited by syncropatrick (Fri 01-Jun-18 14:21:39)