Autumn 2022 Update on UK’s Project Gigabit Broadband Rollout

The Building Digital UK team has published their latest quarterly Winter 2022 update for the Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout scheme, which summarises some good progress, but also reveals that procurements for Lancashire, Surrey and Oxfordshire and West Berkshire have had to be deferred.

Just to recap. Project Gigabit aims to extend networks capable of delivering 1000Mbps (1Gbps) download speeds to “at least” 85% of UK premises by the end of 2025 and then “nationwide” coverage (c.99%) by around 2030 (here). The funding released for this will depend upon how the industry responds. So far only £1.2bn has been released from the budget up until 2024, but more is expected to be unlocked later.

At present around 72% of UK premises can already access a gigabit-capable network (c.42% via just FTTP) and that’s mostly thanks to Virgin Media’s (VMO2) upgrade of their existing HFC networks (here). Generally, it’s anticipated that commercial builds alone could push gigabit coverage up to a little over 80% by around the end of 2025 (mostly in urban areas).

Project Gigabit is thus designed to focus on improving connectivity for those rural and semi-rural areas in the final 20% (5-6 million premises). This consists of several support schemes, including gigabit vouchers (£210m), funding to extend Dark Fibre around the public sector (£110m) and gap-funded deployments with suppliers (rest of the funding) – better known as the Gigabit Infrastructure Subsidy (GIS) programme.

Today’s article is focused upon the GIS programme and related procurement work, which sees ISPs bidding through a new Dynamic Purchasing System (DPS) to extend their networks across disadvantaged parts of the UK.

What’s New in the Autumn 2022 Update

Since the last update, BDUK has followed their initial contract award for North Dorset (Lot 14.01) (here) by adding several more for Teesdale (Lot 4.01 –here), North Northumberland (Lot 34.01 – here) and Cumbria (Lot 28 – here) – reflecting a combined value of more than £128m in public investment to upgrade nearly 75,000 premises (c.£1,700 per premises passed).

As it stands, the total value of Project Gigabit’s procurements launched to date is over £780 million, which if successfully delivered would see up to 545,000 extra premises being passed by a gigabit-capable network. But so far all of this has been in England, while the devolved countries of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are still in the preparation stage (Wales is further along, so we expect some updates next spring).

However, it’s not all good news. At the last update we noted that BDUK had opted to defer the procurements in Shropshire (Lot 25), Staffordshire (Lot 19) and the eastern part of Hertfordshire (part of Lot 26) due to a fear – post engagement with suppliers – that they “will not be successful” (i.e. suppliers showed limited interest). Now the same can also be said for Lancashire (Lot 9), Surrey (Lot 22) and Oxfordshire and West Berkshire (Lot 13).

The BDUK team will be working to find a solution for those on the deferred procurements list, which we suspect could require changes to the cluster sizes they cover or perhaps splitting them into several smaller local supplier procurements. But for now, those procurements are all in limbo and marked TBC on the list.

Live GIS Contracts (Signed)

Take note that, once a contract has been signed, it often takes network operators several months of engineering surveys before they can begin to start a rollout. Likewise, the detailed rollout plan for these first contracts won’t be known until those surveys have been completed. Furthermore, the contract values above are only referencing public investment, but it’s hoped that suppliers may also contribute some of their own private investment.

On top of the already agreed contracts, Project Gigabit also has a growing number of local and regional deals in the procurement phase for other parts of the UK (see below) and will be awarding contracts for these over the coming months and years. The dates and figures mentioned below are tentative estimates (subject to change) and will remain that way until after the contracts have been awarded.

Bidders on the related LOTS will be required to ensure that their networks and infrastructure are available for use by other ISPs via wholesale (open access). Various operators, both big and small (e.g. Openreach, Cityfibre, Fibrus, Gigaclear, Virgin Media [VMO2] etc.), are expected to take part and areas with sub-30Mbps speeds are being prioritised, albeit NOT to the exclusion of all else.

Alongside all this, the government and local bodies are also conducting various Public Reviews and Open Market Reviews (OMR), which is the process they use when trying to identify existing commercial coverage of gigabit-capable networks and any planned coverage over the next c.3 years. By doing that, they can more easily target their support toward areas where commercial projects will not go (i.e. the intervention area).

Live GIS Procurements

Finally, BDUK has a long list of future procurements in their pipeline (see below). But some projects (e.g. Scotland and Wales) haven’t even got this far yet. The following pipeline thus represents an indicative forward view of commercial activity to be undertaken by the programme. Some of the information provided is based on modelled data that will be superseded.

Future GIS Procurements

Michelle Donelan MP, UK Digital Secretary, said:

“Our country has faced-down and overcome some enormous challenges in recent years, all of which have shown the potential for us to genuinely go further and faster than anyone imagined in order to make people’s lives tangibly better. At the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, I am determined to ensure we continue to deliver at speed for the British people.

This is absolutely the case at Building Digital UK (BDUK). Over the past few months, multi-million pound local and regional Project Gigabit contracts have been awarded that will result in major improvements for people living in rural or otherwise hard-to-reach areas of the United Kingdom. Businesses will be boosted, job opportunities broadened, life chances enhanced.”

At present it’s disappointing to see that BDUK still hasn’t managed to launch a centralised website for clearly communicating their progress on each contract / area. The quarterly updates they issue are useful to sites like ours and the media, but they’re simply too tedious for regular people to find, read and understand, unless you’re already familiar with the programme.

The other issue is that it continues to take far too long to get all of these contracts into procurement. The new and more automated DPS system was supposed to make all of this faster and more efficient than just handing the funding to local authorities, but with some areas being left until 2024 or 2025 before contracts are even awarded, it may be time to start questioning whether this is the right approach.

We should remind readers that this rollout is NOT an automatic upgrade, thus you will still need to order the service from a supporting ISP (1Gbps is the target speed, but slower and cheaper options will also exist). Likewise, no specific network coverage checkers will be available for areas in this programme, at least not until AFTER the contracts have been awarded and the necessary engineering surveys are completed.

The focus on “gigabit” speeds also overlooks the fact that this largely relates to download performance, while BDUK’s technical definition for the project appears to suggest that a minimum speed of 200Mbps would be acceptable when only looking at the upload side (here). This is understandable, as not all gigabit networks today are actually setup to deliver true symmetric gigabit speeds, even though some may advertise them.

Lest we forget that there are a lot of real-world reasons why consumers buying a 1Gbps package might not actually be able to achieve the top speed, due to certain realities (Why Buying Gigabit Broadband Doesn’t Always Deliver 1Gbps).

Finally, we should add that the Government has previously warned that those in the final 1% may still be “prohibitively expensive to reach“, although they’ve recently clarified that less than 0.3% of the country (i.e. under 100,000 premises) are likely to fall into this category (roughly the same gap that the 10Mbps USO has struggled to fill). Solutions for those in the final 0.3% of “Very Hard to Reach” areas are still being tested.

Project Gigabit Autumn 2022 Update
https://www.gov.uk/../project-gigabit-delivery-plan-autumn-update-2022