Despite the past two UK governments’ respective travails, the fixed broadband sector has been a true success story over the past five years, and two recent developments in the rural West Country and UK capital show just how the gigabit market is continuing to progress, turning access into business.
In a clear indication that gigabit is available to the masses, Gigaclear has announced it has connected its first customer in Kemble, Gloucestershire.
A well-known commuter village with a direct rail link to London Paddington in around 75 minutes, Kemble has nonetheless long been affected by historically underserved and inconsistently connected broadband infrastructure. While the Cotswolds’ digital landscape has improved in recent years, full-fibre availability across the district still remains below the national average, leaving many rural communities struggling to rely on modern digital services.
Gigaclear’s full-fibre services offer residents and businesses broadband speeds of up to 900Mbps, delivering a connection that the provider says is designed to support hybrid working, digital learning and the needs of future growth. Connectivity work in Kemble, and across 18 rural areas in the county, began earlier in 2026, with the first homes and businesses now able to access ultrafast broadband.
The connection forms part of the East Gloucestershire contract awarded under the £5bn Project Gigabit programme designed to bring gigabit-capable broadband to communities.
The scheme was introduced in 2021 with the aim of accelerating the UK’s recovery from Covid-19, boosting high-growth sectors such as tech and the creative industries, and levelling up the country by spreading wealth and creating jobs. At its launch, the previous UK government said the scheme would prioritise areas with slow connections that would otherwise be left behind in commercial broadband companies’ plans and give rural communities access to the fastest internet on the market, helping to grow the economy.
Project Gigabit specifically targets places, such as Kemble, typically regarded as too expensive for commercial providers to reach in their build and which would otherwise be left with poor digital infrastructure. It was designed from the outset to help meet the growing demand for reliable connectivity, stimulating local rural economies and reducing regional disparities by enabling remote working and attracting new businesses.
Commenting on the deployment, Gigaclear CEO Nathan Rundle said: “Connecting the first customer in Kemble is a great achievement and one that will help close the gap further for the digital divide in rural Gloucestershire. Kemble is one of many villages that has historically been overlooked when it comes to broadband investment, leaving residents with services that simply haven’t kept pace with modern life. Our Project Gigabit build is changing that.”
Meanwhile, at the other end of the UK population scale, London-based internet service provider (ISP) Community Fibre has announced a record year of annual revenue growth, up 48% to £113m.
Operating exclusively in London, as well as parts of Surrey and Sussex, Community Fibre is owned by funds advised by Warburg Pincus LLC, DTCP Railpen and NDIF, and claims to be the UK capital’s largest 100% full-fibre broadband provider.
Currently, over one in 10 Londoners use the Community Fibre service, making it the UK’s third-largest fibre operator and network by measure of customer numbers. Its user base now stands at 429,000 customers, up 26% year-on-year, giving a take-up penetration rate of just under 32%, up seven percentage points on an annual basis.
The company’s product portfolio, ranging from 35Mbps to 10Gbps, is said to be among the fastest symmetrical download and upload speeds in the country. The altnet gained an initial £400m in funding in 2020, followed by a finance facility of £985m in October 2022, which was the spur of a plan to roll out a full-fibre broadband network to 2.2 million London homes by the end of 2024. In October 2024, the provider raised further funding of £125m, bringing total investment in the company to £1.1bn.
The operator has been EBITDA-positive since April 2024, and will be cash flow-positive before financing costs in the first half of 2026. It sees these latest results as marking its continued customer growth in both the consumer and B2B markets, translating into positive EBITDA and ultimately cash due to its lean operating model, positive wholesale launch with VodafoneThree in August 2025, and high levels of customer satisfaction.
Assessing the results, Community Fibre CEO Graeme Oxby said they were indicative of the strength of not only his company, but also the market in general. “These results are important to the wider Altnet industry, as it supports the government’s desire to bring viable competition to the UK broadband market,” he said. “Community Fibre has proven that new broadband competition can not only be financially sustainable in the long run, it can also deliver meaningful advantages to UK society.”
