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The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) unit has today posted contract modifications for two of Openreach’s Project Gigabit contracts – Call Off 3 (East and South Shropshire, North Herefordshire, North Wales, and Southwest Wales) and Call Off 8 (Cheshire). The move expands their public investment and planned deployment of full fibre broadband ISP networks into rural areas.
Just to recap. The Call-off 3 contract was originally signed on 19th December 2024, which was previously valued at £150.6m (public subsidy) and committed Openreach to cover a further 65,120 premises in hard-to-reach rural areas with their new FTTP infrastructure. By comparison Call-off 8 was signed on 26th February 2026, which was valued at £37.5m and aimed to reach 18,460 premises.
According to the latest BDUK status update from September 2026 (here), Openreach has so far built to 4,480 of the contracted premises under call-off 3 (7% completed) and 990 premises under the much more recent call-off 8 (5% completed). However, such contracts are not static and their scope, as well as committed levels of public funding, can change over time for a number of different reasons.