Project Gigabit Begins National Rolling UK Open Market Review
Back in January the Government’s Building Digital UK team “soft launched” a new National Rolling Open Market Review (NROMR) process for their £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout with a limited number of suppliers (here). Today they’ve launched another NROMR and are opening it up to more suppliers.
In case anybody has forgotten. Project Gigabit aims to ensure that a minimum of 85%+ of UK premises can access a gigabit-capable broadband ISP connection by the end of 2025, before possibly reaching “nationwide” (c.99%) coverage by the end of 2030 (here and here). The primary focus for all this is on those living in the final 20% of the UK (5-6 million premises), where commercial investment alone tends to fail (rural and some sub-urban areas).
The first step in such projects – before any procurements can begin and contracts be awarded to suppliers – is to identify precisely which areas are not expected to benefit from gigabit speeds under existing commercial deployments or plans for the next 3 years. This is called an Open Market Review (OMR). Only once you have the answer to that can you identify where public funding will be needed to help address market failure.
However, OMRs are often region specific and tend to only be conducted every few years, which in a fast-moving market like this can result in the data they collect becoming outdated. Such issues have, in the past, caused various problems with broadband contracts, such as an increase in overbuild between networks (e.g. public investment being used to overbuild a more recent commercial network of similar or better performance).
The NROMR process aims to solve this by conducting several national OMRs every 4 months (i.e. January, May and September). The new NROMR being launched today thus reflects the second (May) edition for 2022, albeit expanded to include feedback from more suppliers, “with the intention of including all suppliers over the coming months.” The related consultation will remain open for responses until 14th June 2022.
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 and Linkedin.
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I wonder how many properties will be ‘missed’ as being too difficult / commercially not viable this time and left with substandard Fibre (woops Hybrid Fibre)
Is it normal practice for these types of contracts to have a run duration of 14 years ?
Example being the tender for Suffolk has a delivery of 20 Mar 2023 to 19 Mar 2037.
If they are targeting 99% by 2030 nationally then I’m struggling to see why such a buffer is required.
The important thing to remember is that contract length doesn’t necessarily reflect build timescale. For example, a lot of the ‘Superfast Broadband Programme’ contracts had terms that ran for 7 years, but the actual build may have only taken c.2-4 years. Contract terms usually cover more than just build, such as the need for things like clawback etc.
Project Gigabit won’t really be sure of what they’re likely to end up with until the bids start coming in.
None of this will help Winchester, of course. We will still get left behind as we are not ‘rural’. Zero builds in progress or being planned. Sigh.
Some people did spot engineers from Zzoomm surveying Winchester last year, but nothing has yet been confirmed. The location is of course already covered by gigabit-capable broadband from Virgin Media, and Openreach has a small pocket of older build (but no plans to expand.. yet), while OFNL are present on two or three new build home sites.
Openreach are in early build in Winchester.
Virgin Media are upgrading their network to full fibre there.
Nearly 60% of the constituency has access to gigabit right now.
Nearly 99% has access to over 30 Mbps.
Fair to say there are areas in more pressing need of taxpayer subsidies.
This is all public record from Think Broadband.
According to Think Broadband stats, only 46% of Winchester can get ‘gigabit’ broadband, of which FTTP is around 11% and the rest cable. Virgin Media has no plans of expanding coverage – I asked. My property is one of 9 on my street that Virgin Media will not supply to, and never will (citing costs).
In any case, I have zero interest in a service provided by VM using DOCSIS – too expensive, not enough upload bandwidth, cannot get a static IP, no IPv6 and so on.
FTTP is only (mostly) in new builds, with no plans of expansion from OR or any of the alt-nets. That’s not exactly a lot of choice for residents here, especially when many other cities of a similar size have multiple players overbuilding.
The hold on bduk projects that got suspended because of Project gigabit should have priority and shouldn’t have to wait another year.
Some parts of the New forest have been in BDUK hell since 2017!
Seems very discriminatory to keep rolling out faster and faster speeds to houses when flats are exempt from even getting 10mb fibre option due to loophole in law saying poor people can be ignored and not get access to any investment to improve our access