9,500 Essex premises to receive full fibre in £8.3 million rollout
Key Points
- Openreach receives £8.3 million in government funding to extend full fibre to 9,500 more Essex homes and businesses.
- First Project Gigabit contract to fund urban connectivity blackspots alongside rural areas.
- Covers Brentwood, Chelmsford, Basildon, Clacton and Ardleigh, with work starting immediately.
- Builds on a rural Essex contract covering 10,000+ premises, of which 500 are already connected.
- Sits on top of 575,000 Essex premises Openreach has reached through its own commercial rollout, supporting the 99% gigabit target by 2030.
Openreach will extend full fibre broadband to 9,500 more Essex homes and businesses under an £8.3 million Project Gigabit contract.
The expansion covers Brentwood, Chelmsford, Basildon, Clacton, and Ardleigh, and marks the first Project Gigabit deal to fund urban connectivity blackspots alongside rural areas.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology added the £8.3 million on top of the £1.2 billion already committed to Openreach for premises that commercial rollouts cannot reach across the UK.
Essex already has around 575,000 homes and businesses connected through Openreach’s own commercial full fibre rollout.
The new contract targets the gaps in that programme, where housing estates, business parks, and blocks of flats sit on underground cables without ducting.
Engineering costs for these properties push the per-premises spend above what commercial models can absorb, which means government subsidy fills the gap.
A separate rural Essex contract is already underway. It will cover over 10,000 premises in the county, and Openreach has completed 500 connections so far. The new urban contract extends that work into towns.
Why gaps still exist
Most Essex premises sit on existing underground ducting, which lets Openreach upgrade them without road excavation.
The 9,500 in this contract sit in areas without that ducting. Without it, providers face digging works that lift the per-premises cost above what commercial economics support.
Telecoms Minister Liz Lloyd said pockets of UK towns and cities remain disconnected and that reaching the government’s 99% coverage target requires the rollout to extend into urban neighbourhoods.
Kieran Wines, Openreach Partnership Director for London and the South East, confirmed the new contract adds to the 575,000 Essex premises already covered through commercial work.
The government has now supported full fibre upgrades to over 1.3 million UK premises, the majority in rural areas. The 2030 target is full gigabit coverage nationwide, with an interim 99% threshold.
What this means for Essex broadband customers
Residents and businesses in the 9,500 covered premises will be able to order full fibre packages from any retail provider that buys wholesale access from Openreach.
That includes BT, Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone, and several smaller ISPs. Pricing follows standard market rates rather than discounted government tariffs, so the subsidy lowers the build cost rather than the consumer bill.
The upgrade replaces older copper connections, which typically deliver speeds well below 100 Mbps, with full fibre capable of gigabit speeds.
Households in blocks of flats and on housing estates that earlier commercial rollouts skipped stand to gain the most. Lloyd said the government has already started connecting Essex areas missing out, and the new contract extends that work into denser parts of the county.
Openreach has not yet published a property-level checker for the 9,500 premises. Residents in the five named towns who want to know whether their address is in scope will need to wait for the provider to publish street-level rollout dates.
