Forest of Dean joins Openreach Project Gigabit call-off three

Forest of Dean Found a New Fibre Builder. Which Doors Came With It?

Why it matters

The British government has moved the second half of a cancelled rural broadband job to Openreach. Its public contract counter got bigger; the address list stayed out of sight.

Daniel Kade25 October 2026 at 02:57 UTCReading Time 2 minLast update: 25 October 2026

A replacement builder is named; the house-by-house handover still needs its own record.

Summary

BDUK says Forest of Dean joined Openreach's existing Project Gigabit call-off three in September, following West Herefordshire's transfer in April.
Its October table adds 3,620 premises to the CO3 aggregate, while the rounded built count stays at 4,480; neither table shows the transferred addresses by locality.

Forest of Dean has a new broadband builder on paper. Building Digital UK says its earlier contract with FullFibre for Forest of Dean and West Herefordshire was mutually terminated. West Herefordshire went into an existing Openreach contract in April. Forest of Dean followed in September. BDUK put that second move on its public contract page in an update dated 19 October.

The bookkeeping arrived four days later. BDUK's September table gives Openreach call-off three, or CO3, 65,120 contracted premises and 4,480 built. The October table gives it 68,740 contracted and the same 4,480 built. That is 3,620 more in the contract total, with no movement in the rounded build tally. Both are whole-contract figures. The pages give no separate Forest of Dean count, so the arithmetic cannot be pinned to that district alone.

BDUK's Openreach framework page is one step behind the monthly table. Last updated in July, it lists CO3 at 65,120 premises and £150.6 million, even as its area label includes Forest of Dean. The October table carries the larger premises count but no revised contract value. The update has moved the responsibility to a new supplier more clearly than it has moved the public accounting.

For a household in the old FullFibre area, the useful question is simpler than the procurement diagram: did my address enter CO3, and when should service reach it? BDUK offers an address checker, but its published contract pages do not give a locality-by-locality handover count or a new delivery timetable. A resident can query a doorway. A council trying to track the whole former contract needs a list and a clock.

The monthly tables themselves warn of reporting lag and cover only initial contract scope. Their purpose is to count registered builds, not to certify contractual milestones. That makes the missing handover schedule more consequential. The public can see that the contractor changed and that the aggregate grew. The record needed to follow the transferred streets is still the next document BDUK should publish.