Jordan O'BrienVirgin Media’s Vivid broadband can offer speeds of up to 200Mbps to millions of homes up and down the country, but it’s hardly the fastest in the UK. In fact, the words ‘superfast’ and ‘ultrafast’ barely even apply when compared to the latest broadband service offered by Gigaclear.
Gigaclear has announced that it is trialling a new package for retail customers which will offer download and upload speeds of up to 5Gbps. Those kind of speeds have previously been reserved for the UK’s largest organisations and universities; but will soon be available to UK households.
There are some downsides to this service however. Currently Gigaclear’s network only includes 10,000 homes, and many of the routers and modems currently on the market would find it hard to cope with such speeds.
Despite that, Gigaclear is keen to boast about some of the advantages of the service. For instance, downloading a 1,500MB file on standard broadband connection could take eight minutes, whereas on Gigaclear’s 5Gbps broadband service that could be reduced to between just four and six seconds.
Matthew Hare, Chief Executive at Gigaclear, says: “We’re offering customers the chance to access absolutely phenomenal broadband speeds.
“To be clear, this is a premium service that gives the fastest Internet speeds in the country to those of our customers who want the best connection that they can get. But it won’t be long before there’s a greater need for a 5Gbps service as connectedness becomes an ever more important part of our everyday lives.
“By launching the trial of this 5Gbps service now, we are showing all our customers that we are delivering a future proof network today, one which won’t need to be updated even as their usage massively increases in the years to come.”
While the 5Gbps service is currently in trial, Gigaclear has announced its intentions to roll-out the service to all customers in 2016. That roll-out won’t be free however, as customers will be expected to cough up £399 per month to have the privilege of having the UK’s fastest home broadband connection. Businesses will be expected to pay even more with prices set at £1,500 per month.
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