Wildanet Statement on Withdrawal from Cornwall’s Gigabit Broadband Contracts

Alternative broadband provider Wildanet, which has built a new full fibre (FTTP) network across rural parts of South West England, have today issued a full statement to better explain their reasoning for recently withdrawing from two of the Government’s publicly funded Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contracts in Cornwall.

Just to recap. On 12th February 2026 the government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency confirmed (here) that Wildanet wished to “withdraw” from fully completing the build on two contracts for Cornwall Central (Lot 32.03) and South West Cornwall (Lot 32.02) – both originally awarded back in January 2023 (here).

The provider had already covered c.13,200 premises under these contracts, but the announcement meant they would no longer deliver to the remaining 7,700 contracted premises. But we should point out that Wildanet are continuing, at least for now, to deliver on the core Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (Lot 32) contract – awarded in April 2024 (here), which was originally valued at £41m to connect 16,800 premises in hard-to-reach rural areas.

In the meantime, BDUK said they would now be “moving swiftly to put in place alternative plans with other suppliers to connect premises that were due to be covered by these contracts.” This could involve either running a new procurement for the remaining premises or, more likely, trying to find a way of rolling those premises into one of Openreach’s wider Type C (Cross-Regional) deployment contracts (here and here).

The main development today is that Wildanet has finally issued a full statement to better explain why they took the decision, which as expected reflects issues with the rising cost of building in such remote areas (a well known problem).

Wildanet Statement on Project Gigabit Contracts

It was announced on February 12th 2026 that Wildanet had informed Building Digital UK that it wished to withdraw from fully completing the build on two Project Gigabit contracts covering south west and central Cornwall.

Following a review of our Project Gigabit contracts to roll out gigabit-capable broadband to “hard-to-reach” premises in south west and central Cornwall, Wildanet has taken the difficult decision to scale back the build on these. Despite extensive efforts to deliver the programme in full, the cost of delivery in these areas has increased significantly beyond anticipated and it is unfortunately no longer commercially viable for Wildanet to complete these works.

Wildanet has successfully connected around 13,200 premises to date under these contracts, from an original target list of about 19,250, but will no longer deliver to the remaining premises.

Wildanet is only paid for completed and verified connections and will not receive any funding allocated for the build to premises that have not been completed.

Across Cornwall, Wildanet has delivered more than 50,000 new connections through a combination of private investment and publicly funded contracts and we remain a locally based company committed to delivering reliable and sustainable gigabit-capable broadband connectivity across the South West.

Build on Wildanet’s regional (type B) contract for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly continues. BDUK and Wildanet are in discussions to determine if any changes are needed.

The final sentence appears to hint that there may be some changes coming to their core LOT 32 contract too, which could potentially be scaled-back as it’s unlikely to be immune to the same problem of rising build costs. But we’ll have to wait and see.

A number of other alternative networks (e.g. Voneus, FullFibre Ltd. and Freedom Fibre) have also recently withdrawn or scaled-back their Project Gigabit contracts due to similar issues. But other altnets, such as GoFibre and Wessex Internet, have been more successful and recently completed some of their earlier contracts under the same scheme (albeit for different parts of the UK).