BDUK Switch Gigabit Broadband Contract for Mid West Shropshire to Openreach UPDATE
The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has just announced that their Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contract for Mid West Shropshire (Lot 25.01), which was originally held by Voneus until they “mutually agreed to terminate” it at the end of 2024 (here), has now been merged into Openreach’s (BT) existing call-off 3 deployment contract.
Just to recap. The Lot 25.01 contract for Mid West Shropshire (England) was originally valued at £12m (state aid) and aimed to extend gigabit-capable broadband connectivity to cover 6,000 premises in hard to reach areas, including Alberbury, Westbury, Snailbeach, Wentnor, Ford, Hanwood, Longden, Dorrington, Leebotwood and Bicton. But this was sent into limbo after the contracted supplier, Voneus, pulled out just as the build phase was supposed to start.
The big news today is that BDUK has reached an agreement with Openreach (BT) to include the Mid West Shropshire deployment into their existing Single Supplier Framework agreement (here), which is focused on Cross-Regional (Type C) procurements. This reflects remote areas where no or no appropriate market interest had previously been expressed before to BDUK, or areas that have been descoped or terminated from a prior procurement. Such areas are often skipped due to being too expensive (difficult) for smaller suppliers to tackle.
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The plan for Lot 25.01 has thus effectively been merged into Openreach’s existing Type C (Call Off 3) contract and you can see the impact of this below.
Openreach’s Type C Contract Change (Call-Off 3)
Original:
Type C (Call Off 3): East and South Shropshire, North Herefordshire, North Wales, and South West Wales
Premises: 47,000
Final Value: £108.94mRevised:
Type C (Call Off 3): East, South and Mid West Shropshire, North Herefordshire, North Wales, and South West Wales
Premises: 52,000
Final Value: £119.3m
We’ve asked Openreach if they’re able to comment on this change and will report back later, although the move always seemed like a possibility given the focus of Type C areas and Openreach as a logical fallback. Speaking of which, a number of other alternative networks have pulled out of their Project Gigabit contracts (e.g. Freedom Fibre in Cheshire and FullFibre Ltd in West Herefordshire and the Forest of Dean + Peak District), which could potentially take the same approach in the future.
UPDATE 1:04pm
Openreach has kindly provided the following comment.
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An Openreach spokesperson said:
“We welcome this decision which reflects the nature of our agreement under the government’s Project Gigabit programme, which was designed to make sure full fibre upgrades continue in areas where previous contracts haven’t progressed.
We’re ready to step in and we look forward to working with the government and the local community to bring future-proof connectivity to more people, more quickly.”
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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Wait!…. Is that BT Ivor’s hands rubbing in glee I hear 🙂
Could have been worse. Could have given it to VM.
share price hasn’t moved much.
but more seriously – the cherries have already been picked, all the easy areas have been altnetted. Areas where subsidy is still on offer are going to be the truly hard to reach and that’s what separates Openreach from everyone else.
It won’t stop the rampant criticism of our national champion however. It won’t be XGSPON or symmetric (at least at the beginning) so it’s effectively worthless, etc.
This is going to happen more and more as Altnets start to hit reality with a bump.
interesing as between 2019 and 2023 Openreach gained significant GVBS revenue on voucher projects in shropshire — you have to wonder how much of that spine work or network build to get to those voucher enabled villages is able to be used now as it should make a material difference as you would expect openreach not to see so much public subsidy to due to voucher work already undertaken in shropshire
We are still awaiting BDUK’s decision for Lot17 (Cheshire) apparently expected in November (or possibly late October). That is also likely to end up as a Type ‘C’ contract with Openreach. Hopefully, that could be symmetric, but I am not holding my breath.
Many Altnets builds have stalled or stopped in recent times, expect to see consolidation beginning to accelerate going forward.
Surprised that these Project Gigabit contracts where awarded to Altnets like Voneus in the first place, Openreach being better placed to take on contracts for harder to reach areas.
You have to give the appearance that a competitive tender process is working.