Northern Ireland Tenders for £81m Project Gigabit Broadband Rollout

The Building Digital UK agency and Department for the Economy (DfE) have this week begun the supplier procurement phase of their future Project Gigabit broadband roll-out for Northern Ireland, which values the contract at up to £81m (state aid) and could potentially achieve almost universal coverage of 1000Mbps+ broadband speeds.

So far a mix of commercial builds and some state-aid funded deployments under the £197m Project Stratum scheme have already helped to extend the coverage of fixed gigabit-capable broadband ISP networks to 96.42% of premises in Northern Ireland (Thinkbroadband’s latest figure), which falls to 95.91% when only looking at Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology.

Suffice to say that gigabit coverage in NI is already well ahead of the rest of the United Kingdom, and Ofcom predicts it will reach 98-99% by May 2027 (here). Despite this, the government’s £5bn Project Gigabit programme has previously forecast that up to around 60,000 premises may still need help to access a gigabit network (here).

In order to tackle this challenge, the UK government’s Project Gigabit programme has been preparing to launch a related procurement, which formally kicked off this week with the publication of a new contract notice. The notice, seen by ISPreview, doesn’t provide a lot of new information but does indicate that the 10-year contract has a potential value (public funding) of between £34.647m (Initial Scope) and up to a maximum of £81m.

The figures suggest, at least to us (assuming a maximum award of near to £81m), that the contract for this would probably reach around 40,000 poorly served premises. Furthermore, additionality (i.e. where the build of a new network via state aid also allows commercial operators to make viable build models for previously unviable premises) could then conceivably in-fill the remaining premises to achieve universal or near to universal coverage.

The DfE has called on any tenders for this contract to be received by 16th December 2024 and prior market engagement probably means they may already have a pretty good idea of the potential bidders. The main fixed line operators currently active in Northern Ireland are Openreach (BT), Virgin Media (O2) / nexfibre, Netomnia and Fibrus.

However, both VM/nexfibre and Netomnia have tended to be more urban focused and haven’t won any Project Gigabit contracts before, which leaves Fibrus and Openreach as the likely contenders. One catch here is that Fibrus, which has already largely delivered on their prior Project Stratum contract, have recently been scaling back their builds and cutting jobs (here) – potentially making it harder for them to bid on this one. Time will tell.