Wireless infrastructure firm Cellnex has today extended their existing partnership with UK mobile providers Vodafone and O2 (Virgin Media), which will ensure that both operators continue to have access to share Cellnex’s national tower infrastructure to help deploy 5G (mobile broadband) and future services.

The expected move follows shortly after VMO2 and Vodafone reached a new 10-year network sharing agreement (here), which was necessary in order for Vodafone to satisfy several network and competition concerns related to their separately proposed plan to merge with rival mobile operator Three UK.

However, the official announcement doesn’t include any solid details on what has changed in the new Cellnex agreement, although Vodafone’s proposed merger will inevitably mean some changes.

Andrea Dona, Chief Network Officer of Vodafone, said:

“This partnership helps us both expand and maintain our reliable network in all corners of the UK, not only now, but also in the future. We look forward to continuing to work with the team at Cellnex”.

Jeanie York, CTO of Virgin Media O2, said:

“This partnership will help us maintain and upgrade our existing sites across the country and ensure we continue to provide our customers with the fast and reliable mobile connectivity they increasingly rely on as we invest billions of pounds each year in our networks and services”.

At this point it may be worth reminding readers that Cellnex UK also acquired Three UK’s (CK Hutchison’s) mast sites a couple of years ago. The UK transaction between Cellnex and CK Hutchison was formally approved by the CMA on 3rd March 2022, subject to the divestment of around 1,000 of Cellnex’s existing UK sites which overlapped geographically with the CK Hutchison sites to be acquired.

Press Release

Cellnex UK, Vodafone and Virgin Media O2 have reached a new long-term agreement for Cellnex UK to provide the two Mobile Network Operators with tower infrastructure and associated services. This new agreement strengthens and grows the existing relationship providing certainty for all parties.

Cellnex UK CEO, Gianluca Landonlina underlined how “This agreement exemplifies the strength of Cellnex’s partnerships with its customers. The new agreement, forged through great collaboration between our organisations, will enable the efficient sharing of our infrastructure today and the flexibility to support the growth of our customers’ networks in the future. Cellnex will provide related services and share our capabilities, thereby becoming a valuable partner to help Vodafone and Virgin Media O2 achieve their objectives. At all times, we are aligned with our customers on the common goal of extending reliable and high performing telecommunication networks to serve their end customers. Also, to become integral to the successful roll-out of wireless connectivity throughout the UK to help the digitalization of the whole country.”

“This agreement –continued Gianluca Landolina—further strengthens our commitment to the UK market and provides long term visibility to both our industrial activity and financial investment”.

Andrea Dona, Chief Network Officer, Vodafone, said: “This partnership helps us both expand and maintain our reliable network in all corners of the UK, not only now, but also in the future. We look forward to continuing to work with the team at Cellnex”.

Jeanie York, Chief Technology Officer at Virgin Media O2, said: “This partnership will help us maintain and upgrade our existing sites across the country and ensure we continue to provide our customers with the fast and reliable mobile connectivity they increasingly rely on as we invest billions of pounds each year in our networks and services”.

This new agreement ensures that Vodafone and Virgin Media O2 have access to Cellnex’s tower infrastructure across the UK and facilitates Vodafone and Virgin Media O2’s network sharing under their separate network sharing agreement, which the parties recently renewed.

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News

After approval from the EU, the government aims to increase fibre network funding from €12 billion to €38 billion

Last Tuesday, the European Commission gave approval to the German government to amend the exiting state aid scheme aimed at rolling out fibre across the country. These amendments will see the scheme extended until the end of 2028, and the budget increase from 12 billion to €38 billion.

The funding is available for local authorities either to deploy and own their own fibre infrastructure, or to tender out both the deployment and operation of the network. Areas eligible for funding are those that only have access to single network providing speeds up to 300 Mbps and where upgrading that network to gigabit-capable speeds is not part of existing investment plans.

Following the approval of these amendments from the European Commission, the German government has moved rapidly, approving a new draft law the following day that they claim will rapidly expanding the fibre network rollout across the country: the TK Network Expansion Acceleration Act (TK-NABEG).

The TK-NABEG focuses on removing bureaucratic red tape that typically stands in the way of network deployments. The Act defines the rollout of telecommunications infrastructure as “in the overriding public interest”, therefore the process of obtaining ‘right of way’ approvals will be streamlined and accelerated.

“With this law, we are accelerating the urgently needed expansion of our digital infrastructure. In doing so, we are sending an important signal to the economy that we are determined to drive forward digitalization. This government can reconcile environmental protection and the modernization of our country. The expansion of our telecommunications networks will be in the overriding public interest in the future,” said Dr. Volker Wissing, Federal Minister for Digital Affairs and Transport.

“This will strengthen network expansion, create better planning and give companies legal certainty. Together with simplified procedures and more precise information in the Gigabit land register, we are laying an important foundation for providing Germany with fiber optics and the latest mobile communications standards across the board by 2030,” he continued.

In many ways, this increase in public funding and easing of rollout restrictions cannot come soon enough for Germany. The country has long been a laggard among its European peers when it comes to fibre – a fact which the government says is greatly hindering the country’s economic growth.

The government is also racing to meet its target of 50% fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) penetration by the end of 2025, itself a stepping stone to meeting the European Union’s goal of connection 100% of premises across the block to FTTP.

Figures from the German regulator, the Bundesnetzagentur, put the number of homes passed at 17.9 million at the end of 2023. With roughly 43 million homes in Germany, this means there is still plenty of work to be done to meet the ambitious target for the end of 2025.

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Network access provider Openreach (BT) has issued another update on a long-running underground petrol leak in the Surrey village of Bramley, which has already restricted the ability to safely work on their local broadband ISP and phone network. The bad news today is that “making [this] network safe and accessible” could now take “at least 12 months“.

In case anybody missed our last report in early June 2024 (here). Openreach is currently dealing with the “significant and ongoing impact” of the incident, which technically began 2 year ago after fuel started leaking from the local ASDA Petrol Station. But over the course of that time this leak has begun to cause fuel smells in the area, harming local businesses, and has also spread into the groundwater (i.e. no drinking of tap water in certain areas) and even local utility services.

At least 300 metres of their underground cable ducts in the area have been affected and cleaning it up will involve specialist equipment, processes and lots of detailed coordination amongst the affected organisations and relevant authorities. For example, they’ve already begun to work alongside Thames Water and others to extract vapour and fuel from their network, and the surrounding groundwater.

At the time of our last update, Openreach had notified retail broadband and phone providers on their network that the dangers involved meant that the problem was likely to affect their local work and services for “several months“. Naturally, it’s unsafe for their engineers to access the network until the risk is eliminated, and they’re “proceeding with extreme caution“.

Put another way, this means that they “won’t be able to fix every issue that’s reported to us” (many can be resolved remotely, but some cannot). “In these cases, we’ll be working with Communications Providers to provide alternative and temporary services until we can – for example via a mobile/wireless signal,” said Openreach (e.g. they’ve made space available in their Bramley exchange car park for providers to erect temporary mobile masts).

The fact that no physical service repairs, engineering work, fault management, end customer provision or fibre (FTTP) build can take place (i.e. at least until the immediate explosion risk is mitigated) is naturally very disruptive, and some customers will no doubt be caught out. But the latest update indicates that the clean-up work could take a very long time (also see the local council updates).

Openreach Statement (29th July 2024)

We’ve appointed environmental experts to extract vapour and fuel from our network, and the surrounding ground water, over a period of several months and this work has already begun.

Once that’s completed, we’ll need to clean the ducts and rectify any residual damage to the chambers and our cables before we can return to business as usual.

Because of the complexity safety concerns, we’ve been advised that making our network safe and accessible could take at least 12 months, but we’ll continue to update our people, partners, customers and residents on this web page as work progresses.

In the end, it remains VERY important to remember just how extraordinarily dangerous this situation is and, given the complexity of the problem, it’s not surprising that it could take a long time to resolve. Behind the scenes, there is a massive multi-organisation effort going on to tackle this and nobody is taking it for granted. We can only hope that it’s able to be safely resolved sooner, rather than later. But that reference to “at least 12 months” above may yet turn out to be optimistic.

News

The fibre cables have reportedly been accessed via street cabinets belonging to SFR and Bouygues Telecom

Today, French authorities have revealed that fibre networks in several part of the country have been ‘sabotaged’, causing fixed broadband disruptions for thousands of people.

According to a report by Le Parisien, fibre cables in southern France were damaged in cabinets belonging to SFR and Bouygues Telecom, while damage was also reported in the Meuse region near Luxembourg and the Oise area near Paris.

The attacks have led to service disruption in six regions of France, most of which took place overnight. Paris, where the Olympics are taking place, was notably unaffected.

Both SFR and Bouygues have not commented on the attacks and the subsequent disruption.

According to a (translated) tweet by Marina Ferrari, France’s Secretary of State for Digital Affairs, the attacks had “localised consequences on access to fibre, fixed telephony and mobile telephony”.

“I condemn in the strongest terms these cowardly and irresponsible acts,” read the tweet. “Thank you to the teams mobilised this morning to carry out repairs and restore damaged sites to service.”

No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, though police fear the sabotage could be linked to the arson attacks on high-speed rail infrastructure that took place on Friday, ahead of the Olympics’ opening ceremony.

An ‘ultra-left activist’ was reportedly arrested on Friday in relation to the rail attacks.

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Residents living in the tiny North Wales (UK) village of Penmachno in the isolated upland Machno valley area, which has long been known to suffer from flaky mobile coverage, have banded together to tackle the issue by installing a “cutting-edge, free WiFi system” in the centre of the community.

According to the press release, the village receives “absolutely no mobile phone service.” But the admittedly unreliable coverage checkers from Three UK, O2 and EE do all claim to be able to deliver “good” outdoor coverage of 4G (mobile broadband) signals across at least part of the area.

However, there’s often a wide gap in experience between such estimates from mobile operators and the reality of daily end-user service reception, especially when stuck indoors where the signal is usually at its weakest (people at home spend most of their time indoors, so this is very relevant).

The lack of mobile service has not only hindered communication but “also means that businesses pay more for electricity, power-cuts last longer, the local bus service cannot locate passengers, the mobile library cannot process tickets and people have been unable to phone the emergency services when injured,” said a statement by the community council.

In response, the local Community Council decided to take matters into their own hands and, working with volunteers, installed a “comprehensive WiFi network in the village” – funded by contributions from both a local charity and the National Park Authority (NPA).

Daniel Tomos, Clerk of the Community Council, said:

“This is a significant milestone for Penmachno. Our village has always been known for its strong sense of community, and this project is a testament to what we can achieve when we come together. Looking back, I remember children in the village huddling outside the pub to connect their phones. The new WiFi system will not only keep the whole community connected but also ensures the safety and well-being of residents and visitors to the village.”

The new “state-of-the-art WiFi system” is said to provide “seamless, high-speed internet access” to the chapel, church, village hall, park, pub, gallery as well as the new community hub and even the public toilets, which are run by the community.

“This enables residents to stay in touch with loved ones, work remotely and keep track of the rugby score during Friday night choir practices. The church has benefited from a new contactless donation facility, residents can enter the public toilet with one tap on the new card machine and the community hub has wifi-controlled heating,” added the statement.

Little is known about the technical side of the network setup or its capabilities. But we should point out that Openreach’s older hybrid-fibre (FTTC) fixed line broadband network does already cover much of the village with 30Mbps+ capable speeds.

The telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has today given UK phone providers (fixed line and mobile) six months to implement changes that aim to help tackle scammers who call from abroad and imitate UK landline numbers (i.e. spoofed calls), which requires stricter measures against “Presentation Numbers” that are used to identify who is making a call.

Most of the United Kingdom’s major broadband, phone and mobile network providers have already implemented various technical measures to tackle Nuisance Calls and Scam Calls. But these aren’t always 100% effective, and there are still plenty of operators that could do more.

Back in 2022 Ofcom attempted to clampdown on such calls by requiring all telephone networks involved in transmitting calls – either to mobiles or landlines – to identify and block spoofed calls, albeit only “where technically feasible” to do so (here). The move improved the accuracy of Calling Line Identification (CLI) and they also made it harder for scammers to access valid phone numbers by introducing additional checks.

However, scammers, such as those who make a call from abroad, could still spoof their number to make it look like the call is from a trusted UK-based organisation or person, when in fact they are actually calling from another country. Calls like this are naturally more likely to be answered and thus Ofcom have been working with the industry to tackle this.

What’s Going to Change?

There are generally two numbers associated with an incoming call: the Network Number, which identifies where the call is being made from; and the Presentation Number, which identifies who is making the call.

In most cases the Network and Presentation Number are the same, but there are some scenarios where a caller may wish to display a different number to the line the call is being made from (e.g. an outsourced call centre that makes calls on behalf of different businesses, or businesses which may wish to display a single number for outbound calls).

Ofcom are, firstly, updating their CLI Guidance to confirm that phone providers are expected to identify and block calls from abroad that use a UK geographic or non-geographic telephone number as a Presentation Number, except in a limited number of legitimate use cases (i.e. removing a loophole through which scammers can spoof a UK number from abroad).

“BT has already prevented up to one million calls per day from entering its network within the first month of implementing these measures on a voluntary basis, and our guidance will ensure this becomes standard practice across the industry,” said Ofcom’s statement. Ofcom has given the industry until 29th January 2025 (six months) to implement this.

Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s Group Director for Networks and Comms, said:

“Criminals who defraud people by exploiting phone networks cause huge distress and financial harm to their victims. While there’s encouraging signs that scam calls and texts are declining, they remain widespread and we’re keeping our foot to the throttle to find new and innovative ways to tackle the problem.

Under our strengthened industry guidance, millions more scam calls from abroad which use spoofed UK landline numbers will be blocked – with similar plans underway for calls which spoof UK mobile numbers. We’re also challenging the industry and other interested parties to provide evidence on the best solutions to tackle mobile messaging scams.”

In addition to this change, Ofcom has also called for industry feedback on some additional changes. The first of two new Call for Inputs (Options to address mobile spoofing) will seek views on the potential for implementing different technical solutions to tackle scam calls from abroad which spoof UK mobile numbers.

The regulator’s existing rules don’t require operators to block all calls from abroad with +447 numbers, which is so that genuine calls from UK callers roaming abroad are not blocked (overblocking). But work has been ongoing to find technical solutions to this issue by identifying legitimate UK roamers and blocking or reducing calls which spoof UK mobile numbers, although they’ve yet to identify a preferred approach.

However, if the regulator does decide to introduce new regulation on this issue, then another consultation is expected to follow during Spring 2025.

Ofcom Statement

There are two broad technical solutions being actively explored both in the UK and abroad. One group of options under consideration involves the provider that is bringing the call into the UK (referred to in this document as the ‘international gateway provider’) proactively undertaking checks to ascertain whether a specific number calling from abroad is indeed roaming.

The second group under consideration involves the international gateway provider identifying mobile calls coming from abroad, modifying the data associated with such calls, and then usually forwarding them to the caller’s home mobile network, where further validation checks may take place.

However, there is no clear consensus across industry on the preferred solution. Our evidence on the scope and scale of the problem of calls spoofing UK mobile numbers is also limited. Anecdotally, industry has told us that, as we have closed other spoofing routes, scammers are moving to spoof UK mobile numbers. This means that, while current volumes of such calls may be low, there is a risk that scammers will exploit this opportunity further in the future.

The second Call for Input (Reducing mobile messaging scams) is a little more mundane and appears to be seeking views on text message (SMS and RCS) based scams (but not WhatsApp-like services as those fall under the Online Safety Act), which is intended to help Ofcom’s understanding of the market including new analysis of how scams are perpetrated within it, and evidence on the current scale of the problem.

The tricky part in all of the above changes stems from the inherent problem of implementing such rules without also over-blocking legitimate voice calls and messages, which is easier said than done – particularly at a time when the UK is in the middle of a transition from analogue to IP-based (digital) phone services.

Today’s update attempts to address the problem via rule changes, but once all phone services have gone digital (IP-based) then more methods will become viable (e.g. CLIa / CLI Authentication – here).

Residents in the rural Shropshire (England) village of Brockton (Lydbury North), which sits a few short miles from the town of Bishop’s Castle and is served by a hybrid full fibre (FTTP) and wireless broadband network from Voneus, have for the past month been “plagued with frequent outages and, when it is up, lots of packet loss, essentially making it unusable“.

According to local residents, the new network was originally built by UK ISP SWS Broadband (Rural Broadband Solutions) before they merged with Voneus (here) and only went live a few months ago. The network itself is an unusual one, which sees local premises being served by a Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network and then capacity for that being supplied via a c.10Gbps Microwave (wireless) backhaul link back to Bishop’s Castle or thereabouts.

A number of network operators have sometimes taken a similar approach to serving remote rural communities (e.g. Airband), which can work well when functioning normally. Indeed, until recently, some locals were receiving excellent broadband speeds of up to c.900Mbps and low latencies. But for the past month or so the experience has been rather different.

Luckily some homes do still have the old SWS antenna installed from back when the village was only served by a slower Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) link, which we presume must use a different route for its capacity as this service has remained usable as a backup. But not everybody within the community is aware that this is an option (i.e. it came via local word of mouth, rather than an ISP recommendation).

ISPreview Community Member nsmhd said (here):

“All was fine initially when it was installed a few months back but for the past month it’s been plagued with frequent outages and when it is up lots of packet loss essentially making it unusable.

The trouble is, due to the rural location, a mobile phone signal is non existent especially indoors so these issues have caused significant disruption to the village.

I have been onto Voneus support on behalf of my relatives who live there and then been bounced back to SWS as they are still looking after the network.

Latest I have been told [is that] it’s going to take at least 6 weeks to get the issues resolved as the issue is, as I suspected, with the Wireless backhaul link and the parts are hard to get hold of.”

The situation has been made more tedious by the fact that it’s occurring during a period of change, as Voneus is still in the process of taking over from SWS. “It’s been a real nightmare for the people in the village and not helped by the mess of the SWS/Voneus merger making it harder to get though to the right people and support has not been great,” added nsmhd.

However, a meeting was held about the situation at the end of last week, which revealed that Voneus/SWS are hoping to bring the fix date forward (the kit that needs fixing is inside the community). ISPreview has since received a bit more detail.

A Spokesperson for Voneus told ISPreview:

“Due to the requirement of a MEWP and conditions on the ground which were deemed unsafe caused by adverse weather we’ve been unable to repair a fault with the radio. Our engineers now have the green light to carry out the works safely on Monday 29th July. We’re very sorry for the unexpected delay and for the inconvenience this has caused.”

The mention of a MEWP above refers to a Mobile Elevating Work Platform, which is usually a reference to using either a mobile boom (cherry picker) or vertical (scissor) lift vehicle for working at heights. The fact that we’ve recently had a lot of very wet weather across much of the UK may well have made it unsafe to deploy such a vehicle, although there have also been plenty of sunny periods too.

Hopefully in the future Voneus may consider a more permanent solution for better redundancy, although that would push up the costs of their local network and so isn’t always affordable in such areas.

Voneus currently has broadband networks in over 35 counties across England, Scotland and Wales. Residential customers of their full fibre broadband packages pay from £38.99 per month on a 24-month term for their 250Mbps (symmetric speed) package with free installation, which rises to £74.99 for 900Mbps.

The CEO of Virgin Media’s co-parent operator Liberty Global, Michael Fries, has given a useful update on the progress they’re making with opening up their UK broadband network to wholesale (NetCo), the potential for consolidation within the alternative network (altnet) market and their position with respect to ISP TalkTalk’s debt problems.

Just to give a little context. UK ISP Virgin Media previously announced that their own network of 16 million premises passed will be opening up to wholesale via NetCo in H1 2025 (here), which Michael Fries told investors this week was still on-track to start during the first half of 2025, and they’ll begin “financing discussions probably commencing really Q4 this year“.

As a complement to that, Virgin Media’s Project Mustang is busy upgrading their older Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) and Radio Frequency over Glass (RFoG) based FTTP network – covering over 16 million premises (c.14.3m via HFC) – to harness XGS-PON based FTTP technology by 2028.

Finally, Telefónica, Liberty Global and InfraVia Capital Partners also setup a £4.5bn joint venture called nexfibre (here), which aims to deploy an open access FTTP (XGS-PON) wholesale network to reach “up to” 7 million UK homes (starting with 5m by 2026) in areas NOT served by Virgin Media’s own network of 16m premises. But Virgin Media, which shares some of the same parentage, is currently the only ISP on this network (here).

The rationale for the combination of their new NetCo and Nexfibre business was given a little more colour by Michael Fries yesterday. In addition, they also now seem to be expecting closer 21-22m premises passed in total, rather than the 23m maximum previously touted.

Michael Fries said:

“Together with our JV, which we call nexfibre, VMO2 will ultimately have access to between 21 million and 22 million fibre [FTTP] homes in the U.K. and that’s about 80% of the urban market. And the combined network would be available to third parties, potentially driving utilization and newfound wholesale revenue.

So why are we doing all this? What is the rationale for what appears to be from the outside of relatively complicated restructuring of our operations into NetCos and ServCos in these 2 markets? I think the answer is pretty straightforward, actually.

On the NetCo front, once the physical infrastructure is isolated in these platforms, they can generate made stable and high-margin cash flow driven primarily by the fixed monthly wholesale payment they receive from retailers for utilization of that network. As the utilization rate climbs, the cash flows improve, driving long-term returns to financial and strategic investors. These platforms also allow us to attract new capital which helps accelerate our network upgrade and extension plans and they can facilitate in-market consolidation of both network and operating platforms.

The remaining ServCo can also benefit from the separation which we end up with is an asset-light, typically a digital-first business model that prioritizes customer experience in order to differentiate from other retailers. There’s more focus inevitably on innovation to drive new revenue streams as well as the opportunity for end-market consolidation of other B2B and B2C service providers.”

The discussion later turned to consolidation, which is an area that the CEO of nexfibre, Rajiv Datta, has previously indicated (here) is something they were open to exploring further (i.e. like the deal they did to acquire Upp). But he also stressed at the time that their main plan was still based around build. Suffice to say that Michael Fries follows a similar line and seems to indicate that consolidation is a tougher sell for their approach.

Michael Fries said:

“I mean you are seeing a slowdown in build as financing and capital slowly dries up and I think that will continue. There will be winners and losers in that game. Some continue to raise capital. Others will consolidate and others will stop build. And so inevitably, one way to improve their prospects is to start selling more directly and perhaps more competitively, it’s still very early days.

It’s too soon to tell whether this will have an impact on the broader market, whether it will have an impact on their futures and — or our ability to consolidate or not in this market. But I think the trend is the same. There are companies like nexfibre, which is fully financed at GBP 4.5 billion that we own a piece of, that is going to be building, full stop and is going to get to 5 million to 7 million homes. No question about it. There’s VMO2 which is going already at 16 million homes and 3.5 million – 4 million of which are fibre and is going to get to full fibre, full stop. So there’s going to be platforms like ours with 21 million to 24 million homes and that’s a certainty and BT is a certainty. And the rest, we’ll see how it shakes out.

The writing is on the wall, so to speak but that doesn’t mean between here and there, it’s a straight line. There will be puts and takes. We look at M&A prospects along 3 or 4 levels. First of all, what’s the overbuild with us, if we can upgrade at £100 [per premises], what’s it worth it to us to acquire an existing fibre home that somebody spent £500 to build. Secondly, the quality of that network, obviously, what it would cost us to get to our sort of level of sophistication. And thirdly, is there a customer base. And maybe your main question is, does the existence of a customer base on an alternate change that dynamic materially. And I would say no. If there are customers and we would look to see how those could be integrated or required or migrated. That in and of its doesn’t change the principal analysis. It’s more about where they built, how much they’ve spent to build and how it fits with our broader strategy.”

Finally, Michael also touched on the thorny issue of TalkTalk’s spiralling debts and the possibility of Virgin Media (O2) acquiring part or all of that business (something they’ve repeatedly been linked to in the past), as well as any potential regulatory obstacles.

Naturally, the experienced CEO attempts to duck the question a bit by saying they’re “not assuming TalkTalk is doing anything but competing with us until they’re not,” before later indicating that we should assume they do still have some interest.

Michael Fries said:

“I mean we watch as others do, with great interest of what’s happening across the sector in the U.K. but obviously, with TalkTalk, they’re a competitor. And we certainly are watching what they’re doing and what they’re considering doing and with their B2B, with their network, with their consumer business, it’s really outside of our control. And if there were opportunities, you should assume we would be looking at them, but there’s nothing I can say about that today.”

Time will shortly tell on the TalkTalk issue, but otherwise that’s all we have for today.

Abingdon-based UK broadband ISP Gigaclear, which has long been rolling out their gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to cover rural locations across Essex (England) – via a mix of commercial build and state aid supported contracts, is now facing legal action from Essex County Council (ECC) over an alleged failure to deliver on their contracted builds.

The alternative network provider is principally owned by Infracapital, together with Equitix and Railpen. The company previously had investment commitments estimated to be worth up to around £1.1bn (here), but at the end of last year they also secured a new £1.5bn debt facility (here) and have since won the £16.6m Project Gigabit rollout contract for East Gloucestershire (here), as well as the contracts for North and South Oxfordshire (here).

However, the situation in Essex concerns their earlier contracts under the previous Government’s original Superfast Broadband (SFBB) programme, which was managed at a local level by the council with support from the Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency. As we very roughly recall, Gigaclear held several of these contracts, such as Phase 2b (part of Epping Forest), Phase 3.1 (Uttlesford), Phase 3.2 (Braintree, Colchester) and Phase 4a.1 (Epping Forest).

As we’ve reported in the past, Gigaclear did face some significant delivery delays to a number of their rural broadband roll-out contracts a few years ago, which wasn’t just a problem in Essex but also affected similar contracts in other counties too (e.g. Devon and Somerset – here, where the contracts were eventually scrapped as a result). But some local authorities, like Essex, opted to stick with the provider and accept some delay.

According to the BBC News, the ECC has launched court proceedings against the firm for breach of contract, claiming three of their four build contracts remain unfulfilled – these were expected to bring their gigabit broadband network to more than 10,000 remote rural premises. But apparently around 400 of the contracted addresses in the Braintree, Colchester, Epping Forest and Uttlesford districts are still without access.

Lee Scott, ECC Cabinet Member for Planning a Growing Economy, said:

“We have made every effort to resolve these issues with Gigaclear, supporting them throughout the process. It is deeply disappointing to be let down in this manner.

Rural connectivity is crucial, and our residents have been waiting patiently for better broadband access… connectivity they need and rightfully deserve.”

Nathan Rundle, CEO of Gigaclear, said:

“We have successfully delivered ultrafast full fibre broadband to over 90,000 properties in Essex to date.

Over 12,000 have been delivered using the top-up government subsidy programme.

We are aware of the application by Essex County Council and for legal reasons it is inappropriate for us to comment at this stage.”

The figure of 400 premises might not sound like much, but in remote rural areas it can be extremely costly and time-consuming to extend FTTP to such premises (sometimes reaching £2-4k per premises). In addition, unexpected build obstacles can sometimes make it so expensive as to be economically unviable to deliver.

Network operators with contracts often try to mitigate against such issues by updating their plans to compensate via an expansion in different (more viable) areas, although how much allowance there is for change does depend upon the details of the contract. Likewise, the exact details of the situation in Essex aren’t currently known, although it’s a shame that they’re having to settle it through the courts.

The situation will probably also be raising question marks over some of Gigaclear’s more recent contract wins under Project Gigabit, which they’ll hopefully be moving heaven on earth to deliver on time. Lest past issues start to be perceived as an expected trend.