BT Win Four More UK Project Gigabit Broadband Rollout Contracts Worth £289m
The UK government has today confirmed the expected news that BT Group (Openreach) have been formally awarded several new Type C (Cross-Regional) Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contracts. This will help upgrade internet connectivity across more parts (hard to reach rural areas) of Shropshire, Herefordshire, Wales, Devon, Somerset, Essex and North East England, and Worcestershire.
Project Gigabit itself has been running for the past few years and aims to extend networks capable of delivering broadband ISP download speeds of 1000Mbps+ (1Gbps) and uploads of 200Mbps+ “nationwide” (c.99% of UK premises) by 2030 (here). But commercial builds are delivering most of this, while public money remains focused on the final 10-20% of poorly served premises.
However, today’s development won’t come as much of a surprise because the Government had already selected Openreach, under a Single Supplier Framework, to deliver all of their Cross-Regional (Type C) procurements – reflecting “up to” £800m in total state aid to upgrade 312,000 premises in rural areas of England, Scotland and Wales. But so far they’d only formally awarded the first two Call Off contracts for this (here), which left several more to go.
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The areas covered by these Type C contracts typically reflect locations where no or no appropriate market interest had previously been expressed before to the Government’s umbrella Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency, or areas that have been descoped or terminated from a prior plan.
Such areas are often skipped due to being too expensive (difficult) for smaller suppliers to tackle, which is why Openreach was favoured to scoop them up and ultimate secured the related framework. All the other Project Gigabit contracts have gone to smaller alternative networks (altnets), such as Fibrus, GoFibre, Wessex Internet, CityFibre, Gigaclear, Quickline and others.
Today’s awards include the following contracts, reflecting a total public investment of more than £289m and should reach around 148,000 premises. The official contract award notices for these are vague and don’t clarify how many premises each contract will aim to deliver or which villages/towns will benefit, but luckily BDUK’s November 2024 update did include some recent estimates (these figures may differ slightly on the final contract). The contracts were all officially awarded on 18th Dec 2024, but they’ve only been made public today.
Today’s Contract Awards for Openreach
Type C (Call Off 3): East and South Shropshire, North Herefordshire, North Wales, and South West Wales
Est. Premises: 55,900
Final Value: £108.94mType C (Call Off 4): Mid Devon, North Somerset, and South Devon
Est. Premises: 41,500
Final Value: £77.05mType C (Call Off 5): Essex and North East England
Est. Premises: 27,200
Final Value: £61.31mType C (Call Off 7): Worcestershire
Est. Premises: 23,800
Final Value: £41.92m
The eagle eyed among you might be wondering what has happened to the Type C contract for ‘Central and North Scotland‘ (Call Off 6), which earlier in 2024 was promising to extend gigabit broadband to around 96,900 premises via a public investment of £207.4m. We originally expected this to be awarded at around the same time as those listed above.
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However, there was a clue to the above in BDUK’s November 2024 update (here), which re-labelled Call Off 6 as simply ‘Scotland‘ (no mention of central and north) and is now targeting 76,400 premises for an investment of £157.1m (clearly, it’s gone through a few changes). The contract for this is now only in the process of entering procurement and will not be formally awarded to Openreach until April 2025 (tentative estimate).
At the time of writing, neither the Government nor Openreach have issued their official press releases to announce all of the above, but that usually follows a few days or weeks later. We suspect that the Christmas and New Year period may have created a bit of a gap that means we’re seeing the formal contract award notices being listed before getting a press release. Suffice to say, we expect a more PR friendly announcement of this to follow soon-ish.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Makes you wonder why we privatised BT..
Given the monopoly it now holds..
Hardly a monopoly. I have 2 altnets outside here.
VMO2’s gigabit coverage is currently a little larger than BT/Openereach’s FTTP coverage, with substantial overlap. Then there’s 4G/5G and Starlink. Hardly a monopoly.
Hopefully BT/OR will soon now provide fibre to my fathers premises – 1 of 5 houses in a rural location – the Altnet that provided fibre to the village said it was too difficult (read Expensive) to run the fibre to those 5 with a 6th one even further out but they get Fibre from OR next month from a different direction.
In fact the company running fibre to that village have also not provided fibre to another 3 houses on the edge of the village on a different road.
They just rely on Cherry Picking the easy to get places and let BT/OR take the hit for the bits they don’t want.
I’m not sure you understand what the word ‘monopoly’ means.
Only decision the government has made thats been a good one. Nobody builds at the scale and as cheap as BT so makes sense for the government debt pile
Despite legacy GPON technology still being deployed,………..
These may be some of the areas that they offer symmetric speeds in
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/08/openreach-reveal-uk-plan-to-launch-symmetric-1gbps-fttp-broadband.html
Are maps of the build areas available?
Expect more details on this next week.
East Devon not there, so no chance of a Type C calloff here to replace the aborted Airband build.
Hopefully BDUK will reactivate vouchers.
BT only greed taken moe money from Government leads us into more debts, more taxes later! This is BAD MOVE!
The government should have spend this money for our NHS come first! This country is a joke!
Just a gentle reminder that barring a very brief period you’ve been relying on welfare for years.
If this country is a joke it’s partly because working people are doing things like funding a cruise for you: something a lot of the people actually working and paying taxes despite their many hardships wish they could afford: https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,28140.msg474971.html#msg474971
If we’re going to cut expenditure to free up money for the NHS let’s start with your benefits first given they are clearly excessive. I have 5 medications I have to take forever but I work, pay my way and pay some of yours so you can sit on your backside with the occasional break to harass Openreach, altnets or go on a cruise. If you took some responsibility for your health you’d be in a better place. Nothing personal to you on that one by the way millions should try it.
looks like they need to spend more on education too.
Well the new government has finally got on with it and signed a Project Gigabit contract for Worcestershire, good news I think.
I can see some misplaced blame in some of the comments here. If it takes Openreach to get the job done, then please just get on with it.
The last government was incompetent, and some have been slow to realise.
Wales is devolved so I though it came under the Welsh government and not the UK government, Very strange
The responsibility for addressing telecommunications issues in Wales is not devolved to the Welsh Government and remains with UK Gov.