No Solution Yet for West Herefordshire and Peak District Gigabit Broadband Project
The UK government has furnished ISPreview with a brief update on their progress toward finding a solution for Project Gigabit’s stalled full fibre broadband upgrades for rural parts of the Derbyshire Peak District and West Herefordshire. Both areas ran into difficulty (here) earlier this year after FullFibre Ltd “mutually agreed to terminate” their publicly funded contracts.
Just to recap. The network operator originally secured both the £23.4m West Herefordshire and the Forest of Dean (Lot 15) contract – aiming to cover 7,900 rural premises – and the £10.7m Peak District (Lot 3.01) contract – aiming to cover 4,400 premises – back in April 2024 (here). The first properties under this were originally due to be connected by the end of 2024, but that never happened.
Instead, a spokesperson for the government’s Building Digital UK agency confirmed, during May 2025, that: “BDUK and FullFibre have mutually agreed to terminate the Project Gigabit [contracts] … BDUK is now moving swiftly to put in place alternative plans with other suppliers to connect premises that were due to be covered by this contract.” Meanwhile, FullFibre Ltd declined to comment.
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One possible option might have been to roll one or both of these contracts into Openreach’s cross-regional framework, much like occurred after Voneus dropped out of a similar contract for Mid West Shropshire (here). But the latest update from BDUK states that they’re still in the process of reviewing different options for these premises to ensure impacted premises receive gigabit-capable broadband coverage as quickly as possible.
The agency does state that they’ve launched discussions on some of these options, but are not yet at the stage of having reached a formal agreement. In fairness, it did take about 9 months to find a solution for the Mid West Shropshire contract and so it’s not unreasonable to expect that we may have to wait a few months longer (around spring 2026) before the same can be said about Lot 15 and Lot 3.01.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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