November 2024 BDUK Update on UK Project Gigabit Broadband Rollout

The Government’s Building Digital UK agency has published its latest quarterly November 2024 progress update on the £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout scheme, which now has “over” 30 live contracts in place across England and Wales – supporting planned deployments of gigabit-capable broadband to around 1 million premises.

Just to recap. Project Gigabit aimed to extend broadband ISP networks capable of delivering download speeds of at least 1000Mbps (1Gbps) and uploads of at least 200Mbps to at least 85% of UK premises by the end of 2025 (this was achieved ahead of schedule), before rising to “nationwide” coverage (c.99%) by 2030 (here). The project has already committed around £3bn of its budget, but there are still some big contracts yet to be awarded.

The report notes that 85.4% of UK premises can now access a gigabit-capable network (up from 84% at the last April 2024 update) and Ofcom separately forecasts that gigabit coverage should hit around 97-98% by May 2027 (here), with purely commercial deployments alone (mostly focused on urban and semi-urban areas) currently delivering most of this.

Project Gigabit is thus designed to focus on improving connectivity for those rural and semi-rural areas in some of the final 10-20% of premises. This primarily 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) – 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. Project Gigabit in England is centrally managed (by DSIT/BDUK – not local councils), although there may be variations in this for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

What’s New in the November 2024 Update

The latest update is surprisingly vague and doesn’t include the same level of detail as BDUK’s previous updates, which may have something to do with the recent change of government. This is very disappointing, as we had hoped to see a more robust summary of build progress, including for existing contracts. But instead we get a brief summary of changes since the last update in April 2024 (here), which doesn’t tell us anything particularly new.

Project Gigabit Developments Since April 2024

➤ We have signed three new contracts covering Lincolnshire and East Riding (here), Cheshire (here), and North Yorkshire (here).

➤ We have also signed a cross regional framework agreement with Openreach and awarded the first two call-off contracts under the framework, covering Lancashire, North Wiltshire and South Gloucestershire, West and Mid-Surrey, Staffordshire, West Berkshire and Hertfordshire (Call-Off 1), and West and North Devon, and Northwest, Mid and Southeast Wales (Call-Off 2) – here.

➤ The Scottish Government launched the first Project Gigabit procurements in Scotland, covering the Border areas and East-Lothian, and Dundee, Aberdeenshire and Moray (here).

➤ The Northern Ireland Executive has launched a single regional procurement, expected to cover approximately 11,000 premises (here).

The update does at least confirm that the remaining four Type C (cross regional) procurements with Openreach are due to be formally awarded in “early 2025“, which is reflected below with a January 2025 estimate. Similarly, the winning bidder for Scotland’s two procurements is also expected to be announced in “early 2025“.

Otherwise, you can see a summary of the wider contract progress below.

Live GIS Contracts (Signed)

Take note that, once a contract has been signed, it sometimes takes operators several months of engineering surveys before they can begin to build and reveal their rollout plan. Furthermore, the contract values above are only referencing public investment, but in some cases suppliers have also contributed their own private investment or made complimentary commercial commitments to expand into additional areas (e.g. CityFibre).

On top of the already agreed contracts, Project Gigabit also has a number of local, regional and cross-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 alike (e.g. Openreach, Cityfibre, nexfibre (VMO2), GoFibre, Wildanet etc.), are already taking 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

In addition, there are also a number of projects that have yet to enter the procurement pipeline, and all of those relate to contracts for different parts of Scotland. But the government is expecting those procurements to start sometime between now and the end of January 2025.

Otherwise, we should remind readers that this rollout is NOT an automatic upgrade, thus you will still need to order the service (once it’s live) from a supporting ISP in order to benefit. Similarly, 1Gbps is the target speed, but slower and cheaper options will also exist on the same lines. Similarly, where full fibre technology is being used, multi-Gigabit speeds are often also possible.

Finally, we should add that the Government has previously warned that those in the final 0.3% or so of premises may be “prohibitively expensive to reach” (i.e. under 100,000 premises) – roughly the same gap that the 10Mbps USO has struggled to fix. Solutions for those in the final batch of “Very Hard to Reach” areas are still being tested.

Project Gigabit November 2024 Update
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/project-gigabit-progress-update-november-2024