GoFibre’s Project Gigabit Broadband Rollout for Teesdale and Northumberland Tweaked

The government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has revealed that they’ve made some tweaks to the state aid funded Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contracts for Teesdale (Lot 4.01) and North Northumberland (Lot 34.01), which were both awarded to alternative network ISP GoFibre (BorderLink) during 2022 (here and here).

Just to recap. The Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit programme has spent the past few years aiming to help extend 1Gbps download speeds (200Mbps+ uploads) to cover at least 85% of UK premises by 2025 (this has just been hit), before hopefully achieving “nationwide” coverage (c. 99%) by around 2030 (here). But over time it’s not usual for related contracts to be tweaked, which can result in changes to their planned coverage and funding.

Changes like this can occur due to various reasons, such as operators finding certain areas to be more expensive (or possibly cheaper) to build than originally expected, as well as greater than expected coverage of commercial networks (i.e. reducing the need for state aid builds) or knock-on impacts from neighbouring build contracts in other LOTS etc.

In this case, BDUK recently notified that both of their Local (Typa A) Project Gigabit contracts for Teesdale (Lot 4.01) and North Northumberland (Lot 34.01) have gone through some changes. For example, BDUK and GoFibre recently identified several hundred more eligible premises that could be added to the Teesdale Intervention Area, which means greater coverage than planned.

However, on the flip side, BDUK and GoFibre have “agreed to the reduction of premises scope in North Northumberland, in part to mitigate existing gigabit-capable coverage“. This is usually done to avoid making an unnecessary public investment in areas that have since got access to gigabit-capable broadband.

Teesdale Lot 4.01 Contract Changes

Northumberland Lot 34.01 Contract Changes

The eagle eyed among you may notice that the Northumberland Lot also underwent another tweak in January 2024, prior to the latest adjustment. The January tweak occurred due to both BDUK and GoFibre gaining a better understanding of the Intervention Area during build and survey work, which removed 40 premises from scope whilst adding 148 and, in the process, reducing the amount of public funding needed to deliver this.

The latest figures mean that Lot 34.01 will still deliver to a roughly similar number of premises as originally announced (c.100 less than originally planned), albeit at a significantly lower cost in terms of the public investment required.