Since 2020 FarrPoint has been working with the UK Government’s Department for Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT, previously DCMS) to help achieve their goal of ensuring that homes, businesses and the public sector can access fast and reliable digital connectivity through their investment in the rollout of broadband infrastructure across the UK.
The increasing need for ubiquitous coverage of ever faster, better connectivity is clear, resulting in increasingly sophisticated and innovative applications. As the use cases move from development into the market, it is important that the basic underpinning infrastructure matches the ambition.(this will open in a new window) Project Gigabit, or the UK Gigabit Programme, is a £5 billion government infrastructure project that combines everything the government does to enable and deliver fast and reliable digital connectivity to the United Kingdom.
FarrPoint’s highly specialist team is assisting Building Digital UK (BDUK), the part of DSIT delivering this project with technical advice and support. The programme aims to ensure that what the government is doing is complementary to industry efforts to reach a minimum target of 85% of UK premises to have gigabit-capable coverage by 2025 and work towards as close to 100% as possible by 2030.
FarrPoint assisted BDUK with developing the open market review (OMR), public review (PR) and procurement stages of the programme and currently assist with evaluating the UK infrastructure supplier responses to the various OMR/PR stages and to tender invitations.
During the OMR and PR stages, infrastructure suppliers are given the opportunity to provide evidence of their existing and planned commercial deployment over the next three years to ensure that public subsidy avoids overbuilding any suppliers’ commercial plans. At the PR stage, in addition to further feedback from suppliers, the public and other interested parties have the opportunity to contribute their views to the review. In association with BDUK, the OMR/ PR supplier responses are evaluated by FarrPoint technical and data specialists. At the close of the PR stage, the gathered information is used to create Invention Areas to be targeted with public subsidy. The resulting invitations to tender for these areas are then issued with interested parties invited to bid for public subsidy to build a gigabit-capable network. In parallel to the OMR/PR activities, FarrPoint assisted with the creation of the tender documents and the evaluation methodology for the procurements resulting from the OMR/PR process. FarrPoint provides the technical and deliverability evaluations of the tender responses leading to contract award for the live gigabit procurements.
FarrPoint will continue to provide specialist advice to BDUK, covering complex areas including policy creation, data science, technical, commercial, procurement and legal process knowledge. The FarrPoint team continue to work with BDUK to make a highly complex processes tangible and give unbiased support and advice.
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