Some Gigability customers have been given a month to move
A small number of customers on Gigability, a full fibre network in Shropshire, have been told their broadband is being switched off. They have about a month. As reported by ISPreview, people in the market town of Much Wenlock tried to switch away after being given 30 days’ notice that their service was going to be pulled.
Gigability is about as small as a broadband network gets. It appeared in 2024 with plans to reach 18,000 premises across rural Shropshire villages, paid for by a mix of private investment and gigabit vouchers from Building Digital UK. ISPreview says the only build it knows about is a limited one in Much Wenlock, and that it has seen no progress updates since 2024. The company’s most recent accounts, to the end of 2024, show net liabilities of £105,719 and an average of one person employed, including the director.
On the account the company’s own side has given, this is narrower than a network closing down. One of its investors told ISPreview that the rollout was put on hold about two years ago, that Opus Broadband started sharing responsibility for support, and that only two customers have been asked to move, from a location the provider needs to leave because of works outside its control. ISPreview’s own industry sources described a “handful” of people. Those two counts do not quite agree, and Gigability did not reply to ISPreview over a couple of weeks of asking.
If you are one of the households that got a notice, the useful thing is that the ground has shifted since 2024. ISPreview reports that Openreach has since built full fibre across Much Wenlock and the wider area, and that Airband has put in some of its own network across part of it. Whether any of that reaches your particular address is a question only the availability checker can answer, because this is settled street by street rather than town by town. Get the new line working before you cancel anything.
This is the risk that comes with a very small network, and it is worth naming rather than talking around. Are altnets safe? goes through what actually happens to your connection if the company behind it stops trading, and how to switch to an altnet covers how a move works in practice. None of that is an argument against altnets in general, most of which are far larger than this one. But a company reporting one employee and no build progress for two years is carrying a different kind of risk from one with hundreds of thousands of customers, and that is worth knowing before you sign.
The honest gap here is size. Nobody outside the company has published how many customers Gigability has, how much of Much Wenlock its network passes, or what it intends to do next. One outlet has reported this, the company has not given its own account of it, and the only figures anyone can point at are two years old.