The Project Gigabit contract that FreedomFibre held for Cheshire until a mutually agreed termination was reached in eleven months ago has now been recreated as a Type C contract with Openreach set to deliver.
The new contract is Call Off 8 and is said to be aiming to deliver Gigabit capable (i.e. full fibre) to 18,500 hard to reach premises in Cheshire with a value of £37.5 million.
We will have to wait some months in DSIT OMR release cycle to get any idea of which premises will be considered to be part of the initial phase of the contract rollout. Under the September 2025 data released in January 2026 Lot 17 addresses are generally showing as under review. As the contract announcement has only just happened we believe this means the January data collection point was missed so will only appear in data collected in May 2025 and made public a few months later.
Given that Openreach is commercially rolling out all the time, we might be seeing the first live premises from the contract in late 2026, or potentially sooner.
This means the total impact for Cheshire will be around an additional 3.2% of the area will see Gigabit available on top of existing commercial rollouts. We can only say around as the old Lot 17 did cross into other councils beyond the two obvious Cheshire East, Cheshire West and Chester. Another factor is Project Gigabit subsidy is sometimes used to reach a property in a postcode that would otherwise have been the 1 out of 10 properties missed out due to the need for additional work outside the standard commercial budget.
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openreach did quite of bit of voucher funded rural activity in Cheshire so hopefully some of these areas will be be close to or already partially completed through other what i term polo activity (where they done the easy bit (sometimes through vouchers) and then left the hard bit) as it took too long , wasn’t part of the voucher scheme (for a number of reasons which i wont go into to on this forum) being interested to see what areas are in scope for the Type C and where the premise spread actually is