I am an ex employee for virgin media.
I worked on the virgin/bt network for just over 3 years before being made redundant.
I live in corby and have a workshop on the kingsmead estate, at my home is corby I have a fttp connection on behalf of virgin when I worked for them, I had a connection of just over 400mbps on a good day, and that's with a multimode fibre core to the cabinet.
This gigaclear service seems viable, all they would have to do is buy a few ducts from bt (the company who own the ducts laid down last year which run from Peterborough through to corby going via the few villages).
They will most likely need a few street cabinets to mount the nodes, maybe a few pits in the streets to be built to house the optical manifolds if street cabinets aren't an option.
The problem with getting planning permission to build street cabs is the local council (east northants) can sometimes decline the planning.
The optical exchange will most likely need to be installed in a building that has air conditioning.
They wont be able to use the current bt exchange which is on the way to apethorpe as you wont even be able to swing a cat in the place at present.
I have seen optical server rooms for virgin inside converted council garages and factories.
Lets talk a bit about optical service for data and voice.
Optical for data works by sending signals through a light converter (sometimes known as an optical media converter), the data is sent via Ethernet and converted to optical which then runs underground to your home or office, then it gets converted back to Ethernet.
Basically the Ethernet port on the optical converter box is your internet connection.
Optical for voice works in exactly the same way with the exception that instead of data coming out of the Ethernet port, you would get an A line and a B line analogue telephone signal.
The router that would be used is a combined voice and data receiver with built in router.
The optical line would probably be multicore, i.e one for data one for voice.
Now for the depressing part.
Although companies like virgin media say high speed broadband, fibre broadband, ultra fast.
This is not always the case, virgin media uses BT as their main network infrastructure to connect devices like your modem or router via a coaxial cable which is called hfc (hybrid fibre over coax)
Unless of course there happens to be a railway that runs through the town/city then the optical lines would run alongside the railway, basically because they cannot get vandalised plus they don't have to dig up cables.
So the short story of the above is that bt own the national network infrastructure, everything we use comes from bt, Mobile phone masts in cities will either use the bt network or they will use the virgin network via bt.
The ideal place for an optical server in kings cliffe would be situated near to where the current ducts run, which in my case would be on station road off wood street.
I hope the above info is useful and does not bore most people reading it.
Andrew Watson
Aws network services
Ex Virgin, Ex Bt Network access engineer.