Openreach Take on UK Project Gigabit Broadband Contract for North Shropshire
The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has issued a second announcement today to confirm that the previously stalled Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contract for North Shropshire (Lot 25.02), which was originally held by Freedom Fibre until they “mutually agreed to descope the remaining 8,500 premises” in June 2025 (here), has also been taken on by Openreach (BT).
Just to recap. The contract was originally valued at £24m (public subsidy) and aimed to extend gigabit-capable broadband connectivity to cover around 12,000 premises in hard-to-reach areas. But in June 2025 the operator, which had been under some financial strain, revealed that they’d already completed the build to 2,500 premises and would now only be able to reach 1,000 more (i.e. leaving the remaining 8,500 premises stuck in limbo).
At the time BDUK said they were “moving swiftly to put in place alternative plans with other suppliers to connect premises that were due to be covered by this contract”. At the same time Freedom Fibre said they were “supporting this transition and … working collaboratively to make existing infrastructure available, where feasible, to help accelerate future delivery.”
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Fast-forward to today and the good news is that BDUK have now agreed a contract change with Openreach to include these premises within their existing Call-Off 3 contract under the Single Supplier Framework agreement – now valued at c.£1.2bn, which is focused on Cross-Regional (Type C) procurements (no other suppliers currently tackle Type C).
Type C typically reflects remote areas where no or no appropriate market interest has 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. Openreach have already taken on deployments for other contracts that fell into similar difficulties with different altnets (examples here, here, here and here).
At the time of writing there’s currently no detail on whether there will be any changes to the original deployment plan or scope for Lot 25.02 as a result of this change. The BDUK statement simply says: “In April 2026 BDUK agreed a contract change with Openreach to include premises in this area within the existing Project Gigabit contract (call-off three) which covers other parts of Shropshire.” This is the second such announcement today.
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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The altnets would have screamed blue murder had BDUK awarded the work to Openreach in the first place, so we end up having to let them fail so they can get the work anyway?
Remind me Big Dave… Did Openreach bid for this, or any of the other lots when the initial tenders were being contracted?
Were they encouraged or given the opportunity to do so? If they weren’t interested then why would they want it now?
It’s not typically disclosed whether a particular company bids for any particular (BDUK) contract. So I don’t know whether Openreach actually bid for the initial type A contract awarded to Freedom Fibre in 2023 in North Shropshire (or my area of Lot 15) or submitted an uncompetitive bid (whether by accident or design). But if they didn’t bid then they could have done so as they were not precluded from bidding on type A or B contracts.
Drawing on parallels with the award of Fastershire contracts in what was South Herefordshire during the mid-2010s, before Fastershire was wound down and the descoped properties in the region absorbed into Project Gigabit, the strong rumours at the time (particularly as the later projects were for the more remote/technologically complex areas) were that there was often only a single bidder and that Openreach was not one of them.
So, I think it’s commonly recognised that Openreach were (at least generally speaking) not interested in bidding for the BDUK type A/B contracts because the terms and conditions did not make economic sense to them, but they were interested in the type C contracts that were first introduced into Project Gigabit in (I think) 2023. So I wouldn’t mind betting that it was only the ‘usual altnet suspects’ in a particular region submitted bids for type A (or type B) contracts like in Lots 25.02 and 15.
When Freedom Fibre pulled out of their contracts in 2025 and the bidding process was reopened there was obviously no one interested in bidding for these type A contracts again, hence their recent incorporation into Openreach’s type C contract.
Correction: Freedom Fibre –> FullFibre
This is good news and puts us back to where we were years ago with a contract that should build.
Anyone know how long it may take for OpenReach to update their checker and provide an idea of dates? I know the south Shropshire contract that they took over, build started quite quickly (6 months or so) but do not know what the process is like.
Shame there is no way of getting rid of all the freedom fibre put in that will never be used around here!
You say “get rid of the freedom fibre that was put in” however where they did manage to put it in it works really well. Most, if not all, also provide customer services that BT can only dream of providing. Their fibre network is also not hobbled so that upload speeds are painfully slow compared to download speeds. Freedom fibre and FullFibre both provide synchronous be default while BT hobble their upload speed to 1/10th of the download. Fine for your typical home user but hobbling for business customers.