Two providers have stopped selling broadband on Gigaclear's network
Two broadband providers have stopped selling on Gigaclear’s network. As reported by ISPreview, Exascale and Squirrel Internet have both ended their wholesale arrangement with the rural altnet. The falling out is over how Gigaclear treats the companies selling over its network compared with its own retail customers, which ISPreview describes as a conflict of interest.
Gigaclear has built full fibre past 618,000 premises in rural England, and around 170,000 of those are customers. It owns the network and sells broadband over it, which is a common enough arrangement among altnets. The providers who buy wholesale access from it are the reason there is anyone else to buy from on those streets. Two of them have just stopped taking new orders.
Squirrel says the sticking point was retention. Customers moving from Gigaclear to Squirrel were, in its words, “consistently retained by Gigaclear with retentions deals that are vastly below wholesale cost”, which meant taking orders and then cancelling them over and over. It also says there were cases where Gigaclear’s retention team told customers to cancel after the switch had already gone through, inside the cooling-off window, leaving Squirrel with an early termination charge. Those are Squirrel’s claims, and Gigaclear did not comment for the story.
Retention offers are not unusual in themselves, and ISPreview is careful to say so: most of the big providers have a go at keeping you when you try to leave. What makes this one awkward is the public money. Gigaclear is still building publicly subsidised Project Gigabit contracts, and Building Digital UK normally asks a funded network to offer wholesale access “without limitation under fair and non-discriminatory conditions”. ISPreview’s reading is that the wording leaves room for interpretation, because it is nothing like the detailed rules Ofcom puts on Openreach.
If you already buy from Squirrel over Gigaclear, nothing about your line changes. Squirrel says it will keep looking after the customers it has and has only stopped signing up new ones on that network. If you were about to order, you simply have fewer doors to knock on, and Gigaclear selling to you directly is one of the ones still open. Our guide on switching to an altnet goes through what a retention call can and cannot do to a switch that is already under way, and the availability checker is the only thing that knows which networks actually reach your address.
The honest gap is how far this goes. One outlet has reported it, Gigaclear has not given its side, and nobody publishes a live list of which partners are still selling over the network. Two of them are not.