Devon and Somerset UK Scrap Truespeed FTTP Broadband Contracts
The state aid supported Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) programme has been hit by yet another controversy after it “terminated” two contracts with Bath-based broadband ISP Truespeed, which had suffered delays in its £6.7m (public investment) deal to deploy a full fibre network to cover 15,172 premises.
The Phase 2 contracts, which were signed at the end of 2020 and due for completion by December 2024 (here), originally aimed to extend full fibre connectivity across various areas of Bath & North East Somerset, North Somerset, Mendip and Sedgemoor Districts – where there were no credible commercial plans for delivery at that time.
However, the last solid progress update on Truespeed’s deployment was in March 2021, which stated that the first homes were “anticipated … [to be] connected by Autumn 2021“. But the trail then went cold, until February 2022, when the CDS programme suddenly warned that it was “engaging with Truespeed in relation to delays in its contracted roll-out of full fibre broadband“.
The bad news is that Truespeed’s contract now appears to have gone the same way as Gigaclear’s did only a few years earlier, and BT before that, which marks yet another embarrassment for the now somewhat historically embattled Phase 2 CDS project(s).
CDS Statement
The contracts have been terminated on the basis of Truespeed’s failure to meet key contractual commitments made at the time contracts were awarded. The decision to terminate is supported by the Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency which is represented on the CDS Board.
CDS is working with BDUK to redeploy funding allocated to the Truespeed contracts in order now to deliver full fibre connections to as many eligible homes and businesses as possible in the contract areas via Gigabit voucher top-ups and the Government’s national Project Gigabit programme.
…
However, commencement of construction work on the CDS contracts was severely delayed by Truespeed throughout 2021 while it sought to secure further investment in its commercial roll-out which it planned to deliver in sequence with its CDS commitments.
Regrettably, securing further investment took considerably longer than Truespeed anticipated. Although Truespeed has advised CDS that further funding is now in place, CDS has been informed by the company that it is subject to new investment criteria and limitations. This means Truespeed cannot meet its existing commitments in terms of deployment to CDS’ contracted communities. Truespeed has also advised that it will be unable to meet the contracted build completion deadline.
It has not been possible to find a compromise solution that would comply with public procurement and State Aid requirements and Government funding deadlines.
At this point it’s important to highlight that Truespeed has not submitted any premises to CDS for State Aid assurance and no public money has been paid to the company under the contracts.
Truespeed Statement
Truespeed and Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) have mutually agreed to end their contracts.
Truespeed secured £175m of total funding at the beginning of this year and made CDS aware during the tender process that further funding was required to complete the contracted delivery rollout.
However, due largely to issues incurred during the pandemic, delays in construction work on the CDS contracts were experienced. Despite collective efforts to catch up and deliver the contracted properties within the previously agreed timescales, it has not been possible to find a compromise solution that would comply with public procurement or State Aid requirements.
Truespeed remains fully committed to investing in the region and is focusing on the commercial rollout of its network. Expanding its ultrafast network at pace, Truespeed continues to deliver full fibre broadband to as many commercially viable residents and businesses as possible, improving connectivity throughout the South West.
The CDS programme has certainly had its fair share of ups and downs over the years with trying to get their Phase 2 deployment contracts off the ground, which started in 2015 after it failed to reach an agreement with BT (Openreach) over a similar build (here). Sadly, the problems then continued and an alternative contract with Gigaclear collapsed in 2019, due to significant delivery delays (here).
Suffice to say that the latest attempt at a Phase 2 deployment, which was agreed in 2020 and supported by contracts with Airband, Wessex Internet and Truespeed, was largely seen as another attempt to put their past problems right – even if they were now running many years behind schedule. Sadly, while Airband and Wessex Internet appear to be making progress, Truespeed has struggled.
The situation is sure to come as a bitter blow to those premises that were planned to benefit from Truespeed’s build, particularly as many of them will not have been able to take advantage of alternative gigabit vouchers due to the planned build. On the other hand, commercial builds by rival networks (Openreach, Gigaclear, Jurassic Fibre etc.) will reach some of these.
Meanwhile, Truespeed’s separate commercial build appears to be having a better time of things, and their funding was recently boosted to £175m by Aviva. The operator, which has so far covered 200 communities around Somerset (c. 40,000 premises), recently also confirmed that they held an “ambitious target to reach 500,000 properties within the next five years” (end of 2026).
Customers of the service typically pay from £40 per month for a symmetric speed 150Mbps package on an 18-month contract term (currently discounted to £20), which rises to £70 for their top 900Mbps tier (currently discounted to £44). The service also includes a free phone solution, installation and a heavily restricted router.
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.
« Freedom Fibre Add 10 Cheshire Locations to FTTP Broadband Build
Latest UK ISP News
- FTTP (5530)
- BT (3518)
- Politics (2542)
- Openreach (2298)
- Business (2266)
- Building Digital UK (2247)
- FTTC (2045)
- Mobile Broadband (1977)
- Statistics (1790)
- 4G (1668)
- Virgin Media (1621)
- Ofcom Regulation (1465)
- Fibre Optic (1396)
- Wireless Internet (1391)
- FTTH (1382)
FFS, will CDS ever learn or will the CDS board ever get sacked (as they should have been many years ago).
Has anybody at CDS worked out the common thread in the initial bid they rejected from BT for being too expensive, to a second scheme that met the cost/benefit criteria collapsing as they can’t be delivered for the price that was bid? There seems to be a fairly fundamental denial of the costs of these projects and it’s cost 5+ years of delay so far.
Meanwhile, CDS programme director Keri Denton continues to be paid £100k+ by Devon County Council.
No, because it then means that they were wrong and BT were likely correct.
Turns out someone who builds large scale commercial networks for a business understands the costs of doing so. Who’d have thought.
I cannot pretend to understand the local political structures, but after a quick Google, why on earth is a geography student running a Broadband rollout? Not much technical background to her profiles, but she does love the word “inclusive”. Red flags…
Geography, probably GIS. Which is relevant.
My first degree was Geography Science, second one Maths & Computing. I now write software for a living.
The question is are they competent at the job they are employed to do.
@jonny Well put..
There is somewhat of a disconnect, figuratively and literally between expectations of cost to deploy this project and what CDS board members are pushing for by not putting “2 + 2” together and realise that accepted contract bid(s) were well below actual forecast build costs. Either CDS are inept at estimations and/or are trying to squeeze blood from a stone from those who were awarded the contracts, in form of consessions. Basic low-balled project price
Luckily for those homes Starlink is now available everywhere in the U.K. and 5G is slowly expanding. Will give them an option anyway that’s better then waiting several years for the CDS to get there act together. Unrealistic expectations from the board.
Starlink is also subject to a waiting list, is ludicrously expensive (especially if you intend it to be a stopgap until someone decides to roll out fibre), and suffers from congestion in some areas & occasional periods of downtime.
5G won’t be in most of these places for some time, the UK operators seem to see it as the upgrade in areas where 4G has run out of steam, there’s no rush to deploy to underutilised 4G sites (and there’ll likely be a rush to beef up 4G coverage so that next year’s 3G shutdowns have an even lower impact)
So they signed a contract with a company that didn’t have the funding to deliver it?
Is that the long and short?
From what I understand they wanted to do CDS at the same time as a commercial build to bring the costs down for both. Unfortunately the funding for the commercial build took longer than expected and when it came the limitations and commitments attached to it meant that Truespeed could no longer do CDS.
It does smack of something which requires Parliamentary scrutiny as they are the recipients of one of the biggest sums of public money for their roll-out. The delays are simply unacceptable. I rather suspect that this will play out for a long time. My neighbours and I were fed up with CDS’s failures and used BDUK gigabit vouchers to install FTTP through Openreach for 70 homes. Went live last month and life changing with speeds going from 3-6 Mbps to ultrafast.
While I agree that they could be more transparent, no money has been handed over yet since they haven’t met any target, similar to gigaclear.
Part of this lies with CDS, after complaining that Openreach charged too much they’ve given it to 2 operators who underbid and couldn’t complete the contract.
There may have been no money handed over yet, but CDS have been incurring costs for the several years they’ve been operating for.
@carl conrad, congrats on ultrafast.
To the point regards parliamentary scrutiny of the process would be a welcome signal everything is on the up and up. Plus, this will hopefully go someway to keeping everyone honest in the whole BDUK project at large. Transparency is normally always a good thing.
I live in Street and there has been a huge amount of progress from truespeed here, Glastonbury and Wells which are all Mendip area. Although I don’t know if we are part of the commercial or public build.
CDS are a complete embarrassment & unfit for purpose led by a team who seem to have very little knowledge of what they are doing, anybody else who had a performance record like this over a number of years & contracts would have been sacked a long time ago, especially on the wages they are being paid.
This is ‘local government’, you don’t sack people, you promote them, also if anyone whistle blows you spend loads of taxpayer dosh to victimise all but those who are wasting money.
I wonder if they’ll just accept Openreach were right and just give them the contract so it atleast gets done.
Lol people are still blaming lockdowns in mid 2022. Especially when telecoms workers were deemed essential and allowed to not comply with said lockdowns
I hope that Jurassic Fibre step up and take over. Better value for money and no punitive 18 month contract (as there is with Truespeed)
Bearing in mind that CDS have the right to top slice DCMS public funding of broadband roll out to fund their own existence, cancelling the Gigaclear contracts in 2019 and starting from square one has kept CDS in existence for another two years whilst delaying the service to taxpayers. Doing the same again will mean further delay for taxpayers in Bath, NE & N Somerset whilst presumably CDS go out to the market yet again. Phase 2 was required by EU state aid rules to be run by “local” county councils but the £5B funded Project Gigabit, which almost all counties will see getting underway this year, will bypass outfits like CDS and be contracted out centrally by DCMS in Whitehall as we are now autside the EU. When counties were asked to comment on DCMS Project Gigabit roll out plans in Jan 2021, CDS rubbished the idea of DCMS running project Gigabit claiming CDS could do a better job! As a result Devon & Somerset have been left out of Project Gigabit funding until 2025. See the pattern here? CDS was a job creation scheme by the two county councils from day one and every action they take is designed to keep them in existence. To fail once is an error. To fail a second time is a learning experience but to fail a third time is incompetence. CDS have clearly demonstrated their incompetence.
I can shed some light on this debacle, Truespeed only bid to protect their own commercial interests as they were already or planned to deploy very near to the CDS targeted premises. From a CDS perspective, they were up against it as Truespeed was the only company to bid for those two Lots. Added to this time was not on the side of BDUK or CDS as the State Aid deadline for procurements under NBS 2016 were to close at the end of December 2020 and they didn’t want to risk losing the funding.
How do I know all of the above some of you might ask, this is because I worked for DCMS at this time and was privy to the conversations with the Secretary of State at the time.
The “anyone but BT” approach seems to have really backfired for Devon and Somerset. It’s interesting as by comparison the Superfast Cornwall / Openreach rollout was wildly successful and now the areas that got VDSL (or nothing at all) that first time are now in the queue for FTTP through Openreach’s commercial programme.
And of course since it is Openreach, rural Cornwall gets a meaningful choice of ISP too.
You’re stuck in the superfast days when there weren’t loads of Altnets overbuilding Openreach’s FTTC. I really don’t think Openreach has any interest in bidding for public sector contracts in hard to reach areas, (no matter what the subsidy level is). The game has changed, they’re far more preoccupied with ramping up their urban/town deployments of FTTP before the Altnets become a real issue for them.
I very much doubt they will bid for much, if any, of project gigabit. They gave bigger fish to fry.
As the comment above states, Truespeed were the only bidder for CDS’ contracts (and I think it was similar for the precious round of procurements). I think that speaks volumes about the markets appetite for constraining public sector procurements that are trying to reach the hardest, most expensive and time consuming areas.
There is far too much easy money to cover the low hanging fruit to preoccupy everyone, without the need to tie yourself up in beauracracy, and associated requirements for “accountability” for delivery of specific premises. Far better to have the flexibility to change your plans and only announce vague statements on possible future areas, and jump on the bandwagon of private finance available for overbuilding 30Mbps+ FTTC, especially if you can still get some form of subsidy with the same level of beauracracy in the form of vouchers.
No suprise from Truespeed, never could deliver and would play the blamge game.