BDUK Start Open Market Review for UK Project Gigabit Phase 1

The Government’s Building Digital UK team has today launched an Open Market Review (OMR) for Phase 1b and 1a of their new £5bn Project Gigabit broadband roll-out scheme, which is the process used to identify the commercial coverage plans for 1Gbps networks over the next 3 years (i.e. confirms where public money will be needed).

At present around 40% of homes and businesses across the United Kingdom can already access a Gigabit speed capable broadband ISP network, which is likely to reach over half of premises by the end of 2021 (c.60%) and it’s hoped that commercial deployments could to push this up to around 80% by the end of 2025 (70-80% might be a better expression).

By comparison Project Gigabit, which was unveiled last week (here) and is focused upon the final 20% of predominantly rural premises, wants such speeds to reach at least 85% of UK premises by the end of 2025. The Government also aim to get “as close to 100% as possible” – depending upon how the industry responds (i.e. so far only £1.2bn has been released, but more will be unlocked if the industry shows they can deliver what is needed).

As part of that BDUK plans to run a rolling OMR process, which will work with telecoms operators to establish a maintained national view of commercial build plans for the next three years. By doing this the programme can identify where public funding is most likely to be needed to help extend coverage under Project Gigabit.

The first large-scale OMR Request for Information (RFI) is named for Phase 1b of their rollout plan (here), but confusingly it also seems to incorporate some of Phase 1a.

OMR RFI Geographic Areas:
● East of Cornwall (Lot 33)
● Hampshire and Isle of Wight (Lot 27)
● Norfolk (Lot 7)
● Shropshire including Telford and Wrekin (Lot 25)
● Suffolk (Lot 2)
● West of Cornwall and Isles of Scilly (Lot 32)
● Worcestershire (Lot 24)

Just to recap. More than 1.1 million premises are expected to gain access to gigabit-capable connections in Phase 1a, starting with up to 510,000 premises in Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Dorset, Durham, Essex, Northumberland, South Tyneside and Tees Valley.

Meanwhile, BDUK expects to announce the next batch of procurements (Phase 1b) to connect up to 640,000 premises in Norfolk, Shropshire, Suffolk, Worcestershire, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight in June 2021. The aforementioned OMR thus seems to straddle a bit of Phase 1a and 1b. Furthermore, there have recently also been separate OMRs launched for Cumbria and Essex (here and here), which adds some confusion.

Otherwise, there’s nothing else particularly new in this document, but at the bottom it does include what appears to be BDUK’s tentative technical definition for gigabit-capable networks (a final one isn’t due to be set until about mid-2021, but for now they’re using this as a guide).

Technical Definition (gigabit-capable)

The UK will review the criteria for gigabit-capable networks within three months of the launch of the Dynamic Purchasing System, based upon the consultation with industry, and the UK regulator, around the criteria below. In the meantime BDUK will work with the following technical definition.

Infrastructure that can support gigabit-capable downstream services directly or via third-party providers without restriction, as set out below:

a) connections that are gigabit-capable (capable of delivering 1000Mbps or more download speeds) at the time of delivery of the connection without the need for future hardware upgrades or modification4 i.e., gigabit-capability to be available from day one and if the consumer takes a slower speed it must be soft upgradeable without undue delay;

b) products with a clear and comprehensible explanation of the minimum (5) and maximum advertised download and upload speeds;

c) products with 100 Mbps download speed as a minimum;

d) upload speeds in line with industry norms for corresponding download speeds (e.g. typically 20 Mbps and above for 100 Mbps download services, and proportional for higher download speed services);

e) low data latency in line with recent industry norms and/or the requirements of real-time services (e.g. 10 ms and below);

f) maintenance of other technical performance indicators (e.g. jitter, packet loss, contention ratio etc.) in line with recent industry norms industry norms and/or the requirements of real-time services (e.g. voice/video calling, telematics, telemedicine etc.);

g) actual data speeds and performance during the busiest hours of the day (not more than 4 out of every 24), that do not degrade more than 50% below the higher of these criteria (6) and providers’ service specifications (note: for performance where lower values are better, such as latency, jitter and packet loss, then a factor of 100% above would apply instead);

h) actual data speeds and performance that do not degrade outside of the busiest hours below 95% of the higher of these criteria and providers’ service specifications;

i) actual data speeds and performance that do not degrade as take-up of services approaches 100% of the addressable market (including any part arising from switch-off of legacy networks), to be demonstrated by firm commercial and technical (including capacity upgrade) plans.

j) where service offerings and performance vary by locality e.g. as a result of subscribers’ distances from infrastructure, gigabit-capability to be maintained for all potential customers;

k) order fulfilment and rectification within typical industry timescales, supported by demonstrably efficient wholesale service management processes;

l) maintenance of customer service levels and network availability in line with industry norms, ideally supported by service level agreements;

m) service provision that does not unfairly discriminate against particular types of services, providers, subscribers or third parties (e.g., via traffic shaping or quality of service measures); and

n) for subsidised networks only; offering of wholesale access products on open and non-discriminatory terms in line with the principle of technological neutrality, to enable the interconnection to the subsidised network of any technology which other communications providers and/or retail providers may reasonably consider appropriate in accordance with the wholesale access requirements.

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Footnotes (linked to (5) and (6) above):

5. Minimum download speeds may include the usual framing and packet overheads of the technologies used, provided that they amount to no more than a few percent of the total traffic i.e. data speed is defined as (user data traffic + overheads) / time

6. Typically contention ratios of around 20:1 to 30:1 have been found to meet these criteria and should not be exceeded unless it can be otherwise demonstrated how these criteria would be met. For the avoidance of doubt, the performance criteria take precedence over contention ratio considerations.

The above seems fair enough, considering that the government are focused on building consumer broadband services and not expensive private uncontended leased lines to homes (residential connections share their capacity in order to remain affordable for consumers and there has to also be some allowance for other variations).