BDUK Publish Another Batch of Gigabit Broadband Coverage Reviews

The Building Digital UK team has today published another round of Public Reviews (PR) for the Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout – this time covering West Yorkshire and Parts of North Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and West of Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and Warwickshire in England.

In case anybody has forgotten, the project seeks to ensure that a minimum of 85%+ of UK premises can access a gigabit-capable (1Gbps+) broadband ISP connection by the end of 2025, before reaching “at least” 99% by the end of 2030 (here and here). The public investment (£1.2bn has been released so far) is focused on serving the final 20% of the UK (5-6 million premises), where the private sector has failed to deliver (i.e. the hardest to reach rural and some sub-urban areas).

In England the new programme is centrally managed and that explains why these consultations are all being run by BDUK, rather than local authorities. The first step – before procurements can begin and contracts are awarded – is to identify precisely which areas are not expected to benefit from gigabit speeds under existing commercial builds, which covers related plans for the next 3 years. Only once you have the answer to that, can you identify where public funding will be needed to help address market failure.

The new reviews cover several regions across England under the Project Gigabit programme. Most of the details for these areas, including those from earlier phases, have already been revealed, but the final Public Reviews should confirm the exact intervention areas. We’ve summarised the latest additions below.

The June 2022 Batch of Public Reviews for England

West Yorkshire and Parts of North Yorkshire (Lot 8)

The OMR indicated that planned commercial coverage for gigabit-capable broadband would reach approximately 875,929 premises, and would therefore leave the remaining 490,413 premises without access to gigabit-capable broadband.

Estimated contract commencement date: Nov 23 – Jan 24
Indicative contract value: £128 million – £218 million
Estimated number of uncommercial premises: 125,200

South Yorkshire (Lot 20)

The OMR indicated that planned commercial coverage for gigabit-capable broadband would reach approximately 399,283 premises, and would therefore leave the remaining 355,086 premises without access to gigabit-capable broadband.

Estimated contract commencement date: Nov 23 – Jan 24
Indicative contract value: £59 million – £103 million
Estimated number of uncommercial premises: 56,800

Nottinghamshire and West of Lincolnshire (Lot 10)

The OMR indicated that planned commercial coverage for gigabit-capable broadband would reach approximately 471,501 premises, and would therefore leave the remaining 211,744 premises without access to gigabit-capable broadband.

Estimated contract commencement date: Nov 23 – Jan 24
Indicative contract value: £90 million – £152 million
Estimated number of uncommercial premises: 89,700

Leicestershire and Warwickshire (Lot 11)

The OMR indicated that planned commercial coverage for gigabit-capable broadband would reach approximately 727,245 premises, and would therefore leave the remaining 362,772 premises without access to gigabit-capable broadband.

Estimated contract commencement date: Nov 23 – Jan 24
Indicative contract value: £114 million – £194 million
Estimated number of uncommercial premises: 112,900

All of the above Public Reviews are due to run from today until 5pm on 18th July 2022. Some readers will also notice that the “estimated number of uncommercial premises” above differs significantly from the OMR figure for “remaining premises without access to gigabit-capable broadband,” which is because the prior OMR figure also includes “Under Review” premises into the total (i.e. premises where suppliers have reported planned commercial broadband coverage, but where those plans have been judged through the OMR as potentially being at risk of not being completed).

In addition, any suppliers (network builders) that failed or were not yet ready with their plans to respond to the earlier OMR phase can still respond via the final PR phase in order to be included. This is important because the current market is rapidly evolving, with new networks and deployment plans seeming to crop up quite frequently.

We should point out that BDUK recently launched a new Rolling National Open Market Review process (these will be run three times a year – i.e. January, May and September), which should in the future make it easier for them to keep track of new developments in commercial builds of gigabit broadband networks. But in the meantime, they still have to run through the existing OMR and PR process.