Freedom Fibre no longer holding Cheshire Project Gigabit Contract

Residents and businesses in Cheshire have been dealt a blow today if they were outside existing commercial plans to build full fibre to them, as the Project Gigabit for Cheshire has been terminated. This means 15,000 premises that would have seen Freedom Fibre build full fibre to them over a couple of years will likely not see full fibre appear for longer than expected.

The BDUK contract announcement is short but does make it clear that no public money had been handed over to Freedom Fibre, though there will have procurement costs within BDUK.

Going forward BDUK is saying they are working hard to get alternative plans in place so that premises due to be connected will be connected without undue delays.

We had updated our Freedom Fibre maps last week and we would guess that the OMR status of lots of addresses will change. The January 2025 OMR data collection period has closed, but we would expect this latest contract termination to not have been reflected in the data Freedom Fibre submitted to DSIT, hopefully the DSIT team sort things out so that when the January 2025 data is released it reflects this change.

The two networks with a full fibre presence in Cheshire that seems at a reasonable scale rurally already are Openreach and Fusion Fibre. So we’d hazard a guess these are who BDUK are talking to.