Is 5 Giga bits a second enough broadband for you?

There are some 10,000 homes in the UK that will have the option of a 5 Gbps broadband connection courtesy of Gigaclear. The Fibre to the Home provider who concentrates on rolling out its FTTP network to villages which can show demand and meet other commercial criteria along with a number of BDUK/Council contracts now is able to offer these symmetric speeds by virtue of building a point to point fibre network.

"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 - such as businesses and homeowners who require significant data transfer capabilities. 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 increased in the years to come. Matthew Hare, Chief Executive at Gigaclear

The service will be prices at £399 per month (inc. VAT) for homes and businesses will pay £1,500 per month plus VAT which includes lower contention ratios and premium support.

Potentially the 5Gbps service could support a wall of 100 UHD televisions all streaming different content at live Ultra HD resolutions and as the press release suggested a 1.5GB film would download in four to six seconds. Though it should be noted that many shared hosting solutions are still based on sharing 100 Mbps, with 1 Gbps hosting still seen as a premium option and servers with dedicated 10 Gbps access links still being rare, so if you were to buy a movie from an online store for download it will not be your Gigaclear connection that is the bottleneck but the server and hard-disks delivering the file to you and this is not just a bottleneck for downloads many cloud storage services have similar speed limits that even standard FTTC upload speeds can exceed. Another issue will be the size of the external links between Gigaclear and the rest of the Internet too.

Perhaps it is like owning a Bugatti Veyron knowing you can go at amazing speeds but the numbers of places you can do this are a limited, which with a Veyron is race tracks in the UK.

Comments

Post a comment