Gigaclear’s East Gloucestershire FTTP Broadband Rollout Contract Shrinks
The UK government has posted a Project Gigabit contract modification that shrinks Gigaclear’s £16.6m contract for rural parts of East Gloucestershire (Lot 18), which originally aimed to expand their gigabit-capable broadband network to 4,400 additional premises. But the change shrinks the value of this contract to £10.81m “due to removal of 899 premises” from its scope.
As we’ve said before. 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.
Advertisement
In this case, the government (DSIT) have merely stated that Gigaclear’s “contracted scope” for LOT 18 has been “reduced in accordance with the UK subsidy control regime“. In practice this means that the “value of the contract has decreased by £5,866,944 from £16,682,000 to £10,815,056 due to removal of 899 premises from the original contracted scope of 4,446 to the new of 3,547.”
The most common reasons for something like this to happen are either because Gigaclear found the removed premises to be too expensive to upgrade or, more likely, commercial deployments of full fibre (FTTP) technology by other operators are now expected to reach the same properties.
The provider, which is home to a customer base of 150,000 (i.e. 25% take-up, with a goal of reaching 29% by the end of this financial year) and has already covered 600,000 premises with their new network (mostly in remote rural parts of England), have recently had to cut some jobs (here and here) after re-focusing their deployment strategy on the Project Gigabit contracts they hold.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« Wessex Internet to Expand South Wiltshire Project Gigabit Broadband Rollout
Virgin Media O2 Expand UK 3G Mobile Switch Off to Watford »
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message and display names can be almost anything you like (provided they do not contain offensive language or impersonate a real persons legal name). By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
Here in central Gloucestershire, indeed only a mile from central Gloucester, the wait goes on, and on. But surely we are close now – I’ve spotted a /lot/ of Complete Telecom vans in the area in recent weeks, and places just 1/4 mile away are suddenly showing as available on the maps. Could it really be happening at long, long last, years after other nearby places got fibre?
Removal of 899 properties implies they were subsidised by an average of £6440 each, ouch.
I wonder if they removed an even larger number of properties from the contract, and replaced them with a smaller number of easier-to-connect properties?
I wish they would descope our properties in North Herefordshire like this so that an Open Market Review would provide an alternative. They just endlessly push the completion date on instead, without doing any works, denying us an alternative.
Estimated start date: March 2021
Estimated completion (latest): July 2025
Announcement: As part of the Fastershire broadband rollout, Gigaclear is bringing full fibre, ultrafast broadband to over 5,000 properties by 2022.
PS: We are so far past the end date of the contract that Fastershire has been disbanded and BDUK won’t respond as they say it was a contract from a previous incarnation of them. County Council won’t help either.
Similar position in West Berkshire – just put us out of our misery and descope us, even if we are only 25 metres away from a live connection! Latest we had is that our group of houses would be “reviewed from 2026” – those exact words, carefully crafted no doubt to mean very little.
As a south Herefordshire property descoped by Gigaclear in late 2021 (and now struggling with an intermittent FWA 40/10 service that has in the 8 months I’ve had it often been worse than the ADSL I once received via my ~10km circuitous route from the exchange), I do feel for you. It’s the undelivered promise that is the killer.
We didn’t label them Gigaclearoff without good reason.
The reason why our area was descoped was that they cocked up their costs/modelling before bidding for the contract, which they freely acknowledged in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire council discussions.
Seeing as your contract started at around the same time as ours was being wound up, I do wonder if the same reason applies in your area’s case. If that is the root cause and if the reason given for the current delay is something like “we are having ongoing delivery issues”, then I’d say it’s highly likely you will eventually also be descoped. It’s not like they can pinch a bit of money from another BDUK contract somewhere else to top up the shortfall between the agreed contract price and the cost of delivering the fibre in your area.
The seeming lack of BDUK oversight this long after the contract was due to be completed is concerning. But then again, since companies are only paid out on having done the job, perhaps lack of oversight is not an overriding concern.
This is interesting, so yesterday I got an email from Openreach saying they now had a commercial rollout for our village (Beckford). Which while not listed on Lot 18, is practically in between all the villages listed. Could it be that Openreach has expanded its commercial plans?
The lack of clarity on who is rolling out when is really poor and despite repeated chasing and helps from the MP etc.. no one can actually tell us timelines or who will be covering us.
Until then I guess I’ll serving on my 30Mbps, which feels ironic when Netomnia’s HQ is 10 mins down the road.
If your village wasn’t listed in Lot 18, then the prior OMR must have found expressions of interest in a commercial roll-out at some point out to perhaps 2026 (unless it’s something like a new build, which doesn’t sound like it, or an error in the list in terms of what should/should not be a ‘white’ property). And this seems to be the case.