Wildanet Withdraws from Project Gigabit Broadband Rollouts for Cornwall UK

Alternative broadband provider Wildanet, which has built a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across rural parts of Cornwall and Devon in South West England, has today become the latest altnet to withdraw from some of the Government’s publicly funded Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contracts, this time in Cornwall.

Until today Wildanet held the following Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contracts for Cornwall Central (Lot 32.03) and South West Cornwall (Lot 32.02) – both awarded in January 2023 (here) – and the Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (Lot 32) contract – awarded in April 2024 (here). The three contracts combined are worth £77m and would have helped to extend gigabit-capable broadband to over 37,000 additional premises in the county.

However, the government has just announced that Wildanet will be withdrawing from completing the build for Lots 32.02 and 32.03, where they’ve already covered around 13,200 premises to date out of the original plan to reach 19,250. This will leave 7,700 contracted premises in limbo until the Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency can find an alternative solution.

At the time of writing we don’t yet know why this has occurred, although a number of other altnets (e.g. Voneus, FullFibre Ltd. and Freedom Fibre) have previously dropped out or scaled-back their Project Gigabit contracts after coming under a lot of strain from high interest rates, rising build costs and competition. Wildanet is no stranger to this, after announcing job cuts last year (here), although at the time they informed ISPreview that this wasn’t expected to impact their ability to deliver on the Project Gigabit contracts.

BDUK Statement

Wildanet has informed us that it wishes to withdraw from fully completing the build on two contracts covering southwest and central Cornwall (Lots 32.02 and 32.03). Wildanet has successfully covered around 13,200 premises to date under these contracts but will no longer deliver to the remaining 7,700 contracted premises.

BDUK is now moving swiftly to put in place alternative plans with other suppliers to connect premises that were due to be covered by these contracts.

The expectation is that BDUK will typically take one of two probable approaches to resolving this. The agency will either run a new procurement for the remaining premises or, more likely, try to find a way of rolling those premises into one of Openreach’s wider Type C (Cross-Regional) deployment contracts (here and here). Type C can be used for these sorts of situations, provided it makes sense for both BDUK and Openreach.

Whatever the outcome, this situation does mean that those remaining premises will be left in a state of limbo and uncertainty, probably until later this year.