Wessex Internet to Expand South Wiltshire Project Gigabit Broadband Rollout

The UK Government (DSIT) appears set to expand their £18.8m (state aid) Project Gigabit contract with rural UK ISP Wessex Internet for South Wiltshire (LOT 30). This originally aimed to build their 10Gbps capable FTTP broadband network to cover “around” 14,500 hard-to-reach premises in the area (here), but will now look to reach 21,197 premises.

Project Gigabit’s 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 (informed by regular ‘Open Market Reviews’ of existing UK deployment plans). For example, commercial operators may expand or reduce their roll-out plans in the same region, which can reduce or grow the scope for public investment within those same contracted areas.

The contracted operator could also find the deployment to be more expensive, or possibly even cheaper, than previously envisaged. Such adjustments may occur due to changes in build costs and interest rates / inflation, as well as any unexpected obstacles to street works or greater efficiencies of build than planned or expected.

Suffice to say, there can be various reasons why the contracted scope of related builds and the level of allocated public funding may change over time, although at ISPreview we generally only pay attention to bigger changes (minor ones happen all the time). In that sense, we recently noticed that the LOT 30 contract with Wessex Internet for South Wiltshire had been expanded.

According to the new notice, the awarded value after modification of LOT 30 is now £24,007,064 (“increased by £5,189,447“), which reflects the fact that the total awarded premises have also increased from the original target of 17,481 to 21,197 premises. Readers may note that the original news only referenced 14,500 premises, but that figure often excludes some allowances for future expansion (e.g. uncertainties around ‘Under Review’ premises that may or may not be built commercially).

The change itself is simply expressed as being due to an “increase in volume of UPRNs from the original contract in accordance with the UK subsidy control regime,” which doesn’t tell us much. But the important thing is that it now looks as if Wessex Internet’s roll-out of a new full fibre network in the remote rural area will be able to reach thousands more premises than originally announced.

However, one thing to be aware of is that changes like this can sometime also impact the expected completion date of a contract, although we don’t yet know if that’s the case here (the original plan suggest completion around 2029). Such contracts are frequently reviewed, so we may see further changes to this and others in the future.