Government Re-brands UK Broadband and Full Fibre Programmes

The Government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) has decided that it has too many different named broadband and “full fibre” programmes and as a result they’ve today opted to simplify by aligning all of them under just two overarching programmes – ‘The UK Fibre Programme‘ and ‘Building Digital UK‘.

At present the Broadband Delivery UK programme is still the primary container for many of these projects and is thus probably the most familiar to our readership (it’s been around since 2010/11, predominantly helping to bring “superfast broadband” speeds of 24Mbps+ to 96% of premises and rising).

Alongside that there will soon be three programmes that have now adopted a more specific focus toward helping to foster the national availability of Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband and Dark Fibre networks (e.g. Local Full Fibre Networks [LFFN] / Gigabit Vouchers, Superfast Broadband and the forthcoming Rural Gigabit Connectivity Programmes).

Under the change all three of the “full fibre” centric programmes mentioned above (recent contracts under ‘Superfast Broadband’ are all full fibre dominated) will from today simply be referred to as The UK Fibre Programme, while a long planned re-brand of Broadband Delivery UK means that it in turn will become Building Digital UK.

As a result DCMS will have a simpler more relevant message that is about Building Digital UK with the UK Fibre Programme and 700MHz Clearance (4G/5G related). Practically speaking nothing else changes.