The UK government has today confirmed the expected news that BT Group (Openreach) have been formally awarded several new Type C (Cross-Regional) Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contracts. This will help upgrade internet connectivity across more parts (hard to reach rural areas) of Shropshire, Herefordshire, Wales, Devon, Somerset, Essex and North East England, and Worcestershire.
Project Gigabit itself has been running for the past few years and aims to extend networks capable of delivering broadband ISP download speeds of 1000Mbps+ (1Gbps) and uploads of 200Mbps+ “nationwide” (c.99% of UK premises) by 2030 (here). But commercial builds are delivering most of this, while public money remains focused on the final 10-20% of poorly served premises.
However, today’s development won’t come as much of a surprise because the Government had already selected Openreach, under a Single Supplier Framework, to deliver all of their Cross-Regional (Type C) procurements – reflecting “up to” £800m in total state aid to upgrade 312,000 premises in rural areas of England, Scotland and Wales. But so far they’d only formally awarded the first two Call Off contracts for this (here), which left several more to go.
The areas covered by these Type C contracts typically reflect locations where no or no appropriate market interest had previously been expressed before to the Government’s umbrella Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency, or areas that have been descoped or terminated from a prior plan.
Such areas are often skipped due to being too expensive (difficult) for smaller suppliers to tackle, which is why Openreach was favoured to scoop them up and ultimate secured the related framework. All the other Project Gigabit contracts have gone to smaller alternative networks (altnets), such as Fibrus, GoFibre, Wessex Internet, CityFibre, Gigaclear, Quickline and others.
Today’s awards include the following contracts, reflecting a total public investment of more than £289m and should reach around 148,000 premises. The official contract award notices for these are vague and don’t clarify how many premises each contract will aim to deliver or which villages/towns will benefit, but luckily BDUK’s November 2024 update did include some recent estimates (these figures may differ slightly on the final contract). The contracts were all officially awarded on 18th Dec 2024, but they’ve only been made public today.
Today’s Contract Awards for Openreach
Type C (Call Off 3): East and South Shropshire, North Herefordshire, North Wales, and South West Wales
Est. Premises: 55,900
Final Value: £108.94mType C (Call Off 4): Mid Devon, North Somerset, and South Devon
Est. Premises: 41,500
Final Value: £77.05mType C (Call Off 5): Essex and North East England
Est. Premises: 27,200
Final Value: £61.31mType C (Call Off 7): Worcestershire
Est. Premises: 23,800
Final Value: £41.92m
The eagle eyed among you might be wondering what has happened to the Type C contract for ‘Central and North Scotland‘ (Call Off 6), which earlier in 2024 was promising to extend gigabit broadband to around 96,900 premises via a public investment of £207.4m. We originally expected this to be awarded at around the same time as those listed above.
However, there was a clue to the above in BDUK’s November 2024 update (here), which re-labelled Call Off 6 as simply ‘Scotland‘ (no mention of central and north) and is now targeting 76,400 premises for an investment of £157.1m (clearly, it’s gone through a few changes). The contract for this is now only in the process of entering procurement and will not be formally awarded to Openreach until April 2025 (tentative estimate).
At the time of writing, neither the Government nor Openreach have issued their official press releases to announce all of the above, but that usually follows a few days or weeks later. We suspect that the Christmas and New Year period may have created a bit of a gap that means we’re seeing the formal contract award notices being listed before getting a press release. Suffice to say, we expect a more PR friendly announcement of this to follow soon-ish.