Fibrus Win Contract for N.Ireland Superfast Broadband Project UPDATE

Multiple credible sources have informed ISPreview.co.uk that the Northern Ireland Executive are set to announced that alternative network ISP Fibrus has beaten BT (Openreach) to be chosen as the main supplier for their £165m Project Stratum programme, which will extend “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) coverage.

At the end of July around 48% of premises in Northern Ireland could already access a gigabit-capable “full fibre” network (here), which is considerably above any other part of the United Kingdom. Meanwhile commercial deployments alone (Fibrus, Openreach, Virgin Media etc.) are predicted to extend this to c.88% (here). On the flip side, 30Mbps+ coverage stands at almost 90% and that’s lower than any other part of the UK.

Suffice to say that rural coverage continues to be a weak point for NI and Project Stratum hopes to change that by harnessing £165m of state aid (mostly from the UK Government) to help extend superfast broadband to “approximately” another 78,500 premises (we won’t know exactly how much they’ll deliver until the final contract details are published).

Originally there were several potential bidders vying for this contract, although only Fibrus and BT were left after Granahan McCourt dropped out a few months ago (here). Both Fibrus and BT (Openreach) have been busy making significant investments into their respective roll-outs of 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) tech.

For example, Fibrus already has a plan to cover 145,000 premises by around 2024 (here) and they recently committed to help ensure that 100% of homes in Northern Ireland can access such services by the end of 2025 (here).

Meanwhile Openreach recently upped their FTTP deployment plan in NI to target 525,000 premises for their FTTP build (60% coverage) by March 2021 (here), which was later followed by the news that this would also include 94 rural villages and towns (here).

At the time of writing Fibrus has declined to comment, while we are still awaiting an official response from the NIE’s Department for the Economy (technically the tender process is still on-going until they formally confirm otherwise). We also queried this with Openreach.

An Openreach spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:

“The Stratum tender process is still ongoing, so we can’t comment on that.

However, our Full Fibre build continues, with the aim of reaching at least 525k premises (60% of NI) by the end of March 2021 – and we don’t plan to stop there.”

We should point out that Fibrus hasn’t formally signed a contract yet, but they have been awarded “preferred bidder” status, which is usually the final step before a contract signature. In the meantime, Openreach’s confirmation that they will go beyond 525,000 premises indicates that there may be more private FTTP investment to follow in the future, perhaps to help compensate for the contract loss.

Arguably choosing BT for this contract would have been the safer bet, particularly given that local authorities tend to be quite risk averse and they already have a large civil engineering team. However, the people behind Fibrus, including major investor Infracapital, have experience running bigger companies and should be able to scale-up, but securing enough engineers to correctly plan and do the work won’t be easy (they’ve already started a large recruitment drive).

Fibrus thus stands a good chance of avoiding the same sort of mistakes that Gigaclear made in England, when they also had to scale-up rapidly in order to meet some major Building Digital UK contracts and ended up struggling (this has since been largely rectified following Infracapital’s acquisition, but many projects were delayed and one contract – Devon & Somerset – scrapped).

We should point out that Fibrus also recently secured the £15m Full Fibre Northern Ireland Consortium (FFNI) contract, which will construct a new gigabit-capable fibre network to connect around 880 public sector sites across 10 council areas by March 2021 (here).

The question now is how many premises will actually receive FTTP as a result of Fibrus winning the contract and how long will that take to deploy? Answers like this often, but not always, tend to follow a few months after the contract signature. We will of course update again once an official response arrives.

UPDATE 15th Sept 2020 – 8:42am

A spokesperson for NI’s Department for the Economy said: “DfE cannot respond to any speculation regarding its intent to award a contract for Project Stratum.” Despite this we are confident that the contract (or a big part of it) has gone to Fibrus, so expect the official announcement soon.

UPDATE 20th Nov 2020

The deal with Fibrus has now been confirmed and, including private investment, is said to be worth £350m. Fibrus added that Stratum will help ensure that every home in the region will have access to full fibre broadband by 2025. Oddly though, the press release mentions two figures, stating both “approximately 79,000” premises and then later saying “more than 76,000“.