Wildanet Withdraws from Project Gigabit Broadband Rollouts for Cornwall UK
Alternative broadband provider Wildanet, which has built a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across rural parts of Cornwall and Devon in South West England, has today become the latest altnet to withdraw from some of the Government’s publicly funded Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contracts, this time in Cornwall.
Until today Wildanet held the following Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contracts for Cornwall Central (Lot 32.03) and South West Cornwall (Lot 32.02) – both awarded in January 2023 (here) – and the Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (Lot 32) contract – awarded in April 2024 (here). The three contracts combined are worth £77m and would have helped to extend gigabit-capable broadband to over 37,000 additional premises in the county.
However, the government has just announced that Wildanet will be withdrawing from completing the build for Lots 32.02 and 32.03, where they’ve already covered around 13,200 premises to date out of the original plan to reach 19,250. This will leave 7,700 contracted premises in limbo until the Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency can find an alternative solution.
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At the time of writing we don’t yet know why this has occurred, although a number of other altnets (e.g. Voneus, FullFibre Ltd. and Freedom Fibre) have previously dropped out or scaled-back their Project Gigabit contracts after coming under a lot of strain from high interest rates, rising build costs and competition. Wildanet is no stranger to this, after announcing job cuts last year (here), although at the time they informed ISPreview that this wasn’t expected to impact their ability to deliver on the Project Gigabit contracts.
BDUK Statement
Wildanet has informed us that it wishes to withdraw from fully completing the build on two contracts covering southwest and central Cornwall (Lots 32.02 and 32.03). Wildanet has successfully covered around 13,200 premises to date under these contracts but will no longer deliver to the remaining 7,700 contracted premises.
BDUK is now moving swiftly to put in place alternative plans with other suppliers to connect premises that were due to be covered by these contracts.
The expectation is that BDUK will typically take one of two probable approaches to resolving this. The agency will either run a new procurement for the remaining premises or, more likely, try to find a way of rolling those premises into one of Openreach’s wider Type C (Cross-Regional) deployment contracts (here and here). Type C can be used for these sorts of situations, provided it makes sense for both BDUK and Openreach.
Whatever the outcome, this situation does mean that those remaining premises will be left in a state of limbo and uncertainty, probably until later this year.
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.
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I have repeatedly mentioned my parents’ home which is I think covered under one of these contracts. Wildanet’s own ducting goes past the property, no sign of activity in the last year or so, website says the postcode is not planned to be covered. Does this mean they’re now abandoning that investment?
Not that the service is anything much to write home about. It costs more than Openreach ISPs, there is no choice of ISP other than themselves, and (for this website’s symmetric obsessives) they don’t offer symmetric speeds except on even more eyewateringly expensive business services.
I don’t even understand why they got the gig given that there’s a lot of OR FTTP around (Superfast Cornwall and commercial) and OR seems intent on commercially infilling the FTTC eventually.
But that said, at the risk of being called a BT shareholder again – just give them these piles of money and get Openreach to finish the job!
It does seem odd that their aversion (and everyone else’s, as well) to building has now reached the extent that they no longer do it even when someone else is paying them to. It’s also notable that there seems to be no penalty clauses to breaking these presumably legally-binding contracts. Yet one more farce to go with all the others in the sector.
OpenSlouch, were already given Billions for FTTP in many parts of the country, to no avail. The only progress people saw, in many Rural left behind areas was, swanky new OpenSlouch vans with OpenSlouch Full fibre emblazoned on them. When, they could be prised out of BT exchanges, on permanent coffee break to actually maintain their, creaking Copper infrastructure. Lets just say Privatisation didn’t enhance BT / Openreach customer service. All the money went, in exorbitant Director salaries & bonuses, share buy backs & dividends…
Charlie-UK, writing in the style and substance of either Ad47uk, or Fanny Adams. 🙂
@CUK – please tell us locations where OR were funded to install FTTP, but did not.
Charlie. Openreach haven’t pulled out of this contract. As is now becoming a pattern, it’s an Alt
net pulling out all by themselves. It’s almost like the Altnet’s sums didn’t add up.
These prems may origionally have been earmarked to be part of a wider type c contract, for Openreach. Wildanet, who were on a massive pr blitz, perhaps lobbied like billy-o to change them to a type b contract, and bduk happy to oblige – the mood music was pro altnet at the time. But many of these final prems were the ones previous Openreach contracts hadn’t picked up, so probably very hard to do. Presumably the ones getting left out are amongst the hardest, and there comes a time when costs (£5000+ ?) are a bit high to justify. Especially with a £35pm budget Starlink option.
Why do Openreach need piles of money? They are a large company that is making or suppose to be making millions, well BT is anyway, so they have enough money to stick fibre in where your parents live.
Too much of the taxpayers money going to large companies, no doubt some in government have shares in these companies as well.
FFF – at least in my example, it is definitely not a high cost per premise nor is it starlink territory. It’s a densely populated though rural street. Openreach FTTC has been available since the early days and there is Openreach FTTP within spitting distance on adjacent streets.
Like I said, they’ve already done the expensive bit, but they’re not getting any revenue from it right now.
Ad – I would actually agree that it shouldn’t need subsidy given what I have said above, but the last government decided that they needed to dole out the cash. If there’s going to be a replacement BDUK contract then it ought to go to the one company that will actually get it done and use the infrastructure that was put in place through Superfast Cornwall.
Ivor – may be doable as an Openreach Community Fibre Partnership if BDUK vouchers get turned on again for the descoped prems. Residents could get the ball rolling by asking OR for a quote straightaway, it takes a while to get quote.
This is happening quite a lot lately, Altnets pulling out of these contracts they have been awarded, when they find that they can’t fulfill their part without losing money no doubt. There should be some form of sanction for not delivering on what they have been trusted with.
The, well written, article asks the correct journalistic question: why?
It’s unclear if Wildanet quit or BDUK terminated. Someone should say why.
Wildanet says they requested to withdraw and, as above, BDUK clearly accepted.
Looks like the Nokia contract is also being cancelled. Cut backs at a struggling altnet?
I sense a pattern here. BDUK award it to non openreach to “help competiton” non openreach fail. Openreach come to save the day. May aswell skip the nonsense and confirm altnet and pia has failed. Give it all to Openreach and financially penalise them if they miss. In the long run it will help everyone.
As previously mentioned in earlier comments. The Altnets win the contract then back out when they realise the contract is worth nothing to them.
You’d think they’d do due diligence before they bid!! In my opinion they only bid to satisfy the investors at the time.
Wildanet stopped building in my area about 12 months ago. Stopped at the house next door. Spoke to sales who gave me some story about needing wayleave access to a BT pole to carry on the build (despite that they dug trenches everywhere else in the village). Not long after that Wildanet updated their website to say they had no plans to build in our postcode! I think that they’ve been planning to exit the bduk contract for a while. Anyway, had an email from Openreach back in August 2025 saying they’ll be building in our area in the next 12 months. I’d rather use Openreach as I’ve not heard great things about Wildanet connections (apparently can be unreliable, and some people here have moaned about shoddy installs!). We will see if that pans out, if not I’ll look at Starlink, or maybe Amazons alternate later in the year.
To be fair to OR, they (and the subbies) have done a great job in rural Dankshire Town, estimated properties around 4000. They started the spine in the autumn 2025, by jan 2026 I got fttp, and the aggregator, twelve port, only has three ports left.
One altnet got halfway, gave up, the other ran away from the bduk, never even started.
Like the FTTC rollout, the BDUK is a perfect example of a local & central government screw up.
Fascinating video (YouTube) — relevant to discussions about how Alt-nets arose — with insights from Peter Cochrane OBE in 2006 on the UK’s emerging fibre opportunity back in the late 80s and how we moved away from it throughout the 90s. youtube.com/watch?v=T0Ab4IvIXbE Scroll to 4m30 if you’ve only got a couple of minutes.
This nation still has a burning desire for longer-lasting IT infrastructure than a water company’s financial forecast. Imagine if we’d had sovereignty over a coherent infrastructure builder such as was eventually created a couple of decades later: But we hobbled the UK’s next three-plus decades in pursuit of off-shoring our assets and creating a market mostly full of merger-and-acquisition fodder over which only toothless regulators watched.
The emerging opportunity to spend tens of billions of pounds on fibre infrastructure that wouldn’t be needed until decades later? No government that wanted to be re-elected was going to do that. Peter Cochrane was very naive.
In my area Wildanet have duplicated BT’s Fibre coverage in the three local exchanges.
I went to a sales road show last May and Wildanet staff couldn’t understand why I was the only poerson there. I explained that the area they were in was a BT Fibre only exchange with fibre installed 7 years ago.
My place is 800 metres from BT Fibre from one exchange and 600 metres from fibre in the other exchange.
Wildanet Fibre has been mounted on the pole that should feed my place for 15 months.
The road outside my gate was dug right up the middle in September and Wildanet ducts laid with ‘pavemment’
boxes to feed each neighbouring property – approx 12 in all.
So it appears they’ve squandereed the money duplicating BT’s coverage and now pulled out.
Hard to swallow …