Openreach’s Essex and North East England Project Gigabit Broadband Contract Expands

The UK government has posted a Project Gigabit modification for Openreach’s £61.3m (public subsidy) contract to extend the reach of their full fibre (FTTP) based gigabit broadband network across Essex and North East England. This increases the value by £610,393 to £61.92m and will now reach an additional 269 premises in remote rural areas (total target now 24,707 premises).

Just to remind. Project Gigabit’s contracts are not static and their scope, as well as committed levels of public funding, can change over time for a number of different reasons (informed by regular ‘Open Market Reviews’ of existing UK deployment plans). For example, commercial operators may expand or reduce their roll-out plans in the same region, which can reduce or grow the scope for public investment within those same contracted areas.

The contracted operator could also find the deployment to be more expensive, or possibly even cheaper, than previously envisaged. Such adjustments may occur due to changes in build costs and interest rates / inflation, as well as any unexpected obstacles to street works or greater efficiencies of build than planned or expected. Suffice to say, there can be various reasons why the contracted scope of related builds and the level of allocated public funding may change over time.

In this case, the government (DSIT) have merely stated that “additional scope” has been added to Openreach’s Type C (Call Off 5) roll-out contract (first awarded Jan 2025) for the hardest-to-reach parts of Essex and North East England, which means that the “awarded premises have increased (rescoped) by 269“. This has pushed the contract value higher by £610,393 (roughly £2.27k per premises added).

The areas covered by Type C (Cross-Regional) contracts typically reflect locations where no or no appropriate market interest had previously been expressed before to the Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency, or areas that have been descoped or terminated from a prior procurement (i.e. there was a lack of market interest in upgrading them). Such areas are often skipped due to being too expensive (difficult) for smaller suppliers to tackle.

Clearly, in this case, Openreach has identified an ability to reach more premises with their contracted roll-out than previously planned. We don’t currently know whether this represents the addition of a specific community (communities) or whether it’s just a broader increase found across multiple locations. The original roll-out map has yet to be updated for the Call Off 5 changes:

Openreach Call Off 5 Gigabit Broadband Rollout Map (Dec 2024)

The new service, once live, can be ordered via various ISPs, such as BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Vodafone and many more (Openreach FTTP ISP Choices) – it is not currently an automatic upgrade, although some providers have started to do free automatic upgrades as older copper-based services and lines are slowly withdrawn.

The roll-out phase of the above contract is set to take another 2-3 years, although the contract itself runs until 30th September 2037; this includes clawback provisions that may return some of the public money that has been invested to conduct the build.