The UK Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout scheme has today announced two new contracts, which sees ISP Gigaclear awarded £26.5m to cover around 10,000 rural premises in North and South Oxfordshire. At the same time, Connect Fibre has scooped a £16.5m deal to cover 6,000 premises in North East Staffordshire.
Just to recap. Project Gigabit aims to extend 1Gbps (download) capable networks to reach at least 85% of UK premises by the end of 2025, before hopefully achieving “nationwide” coverage (c. 99%) by around 2030 (here). Commercial investment is expected to deliver more than 80% of this, which leaves the government’s scheme to focus on tackling the final 20% (mostly rural and some sub-urban areas), where the private sector alone often fails. The project is technology neutral, so it can be delivered via either “full fibre” FTTP, Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) or fixed wireless access (e.g. 5G) – but FTTP is strongly favoured.
The project uses a number of different methods to tackle this challenge (e.g. vouches and investment in dark fibre builds), but the largest part of the scheme involves a gap-funded subsidy approach – the Gigabit Infrastructure Subsidy (GIS). This is where smaller local or larger regional contracts are awarded to network operators and ISPs who can help to build their gigabit-capable infrastructure across the final 20%.
The Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency, which manages this programme, has already awarded a string of initial rollout contracts to various operators – across various parts of the UK (see bottom of article for a summary), but this news reflects the first new awards they’ve announced since July 2023. We’re expecting a few more announcements to follow close behind.
The biggest of the two contracts has seen Gigaclear win £26.5m of public investment to extend their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to cover an additional 10,000 premises in hard-to-reach parts of Oxfordshire, including communities such as Stoke Row, Somerton and North Aston, among others.
The deal actually reflects two Project Gigabit contracts – South Oxfordshire (Lot 13.01 – c.6,500 premises) and North Oxfordshire (Lot 13.02 – 4,900 premises), which should complement the provider’s existing commercial £84m investment across the whole of Oxfordshire.
However, we hope Gigaclear will do a better job of this than they did with their some of their previous BDUK contracts, which suffered from significant delays and a few even ended up being cancelled (e.g. Devon and Somerset). BDUK will have hopefully made extra sure that the mistakes of the past, which occurred under different leadership, are not going to be repeated.