Government Confirms Gigabit Broadband Covers 80 Percent of UK

The Government has today confirmed that 80% of the United Kingdom now has access to a gigabit-capable broadband ISP network, which marks good progress on their way to achieving at least 85% coverage by 2025, and then “nationwide” (c.99%) coverage by 2030. But most of the progress so far has been fuelled by commercial builds.

The news shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise because we reported something similar last month (here), albeit focused on 80% of “homes” having access, rather than all premises. Nevertheless, the vast majority of this rapid network expansion is still being dominated by commercial deployments from a large number of network operators, such as Openreach (BT), Virgin Media (O2 + Nexfibre), CityFibre, Netomnia, Hyperoptic, Gigaclear and many.. more (Summary of UK Full Fibre Builds).

The progress also bodes well for the Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout scheme, which aims to extend 1Gbps download speeds (200Mbps+ uploads) to at least 85% of UK premises by the end of 2025, before hopefully achieving “nationwide” coverage (c. 99%) by around 2030 (here) – this project focuses upon the final 20% of hardest to reach premises (5-6 million premises exist within that final 20%, but they won’t all need help from public funding).

According to the most recent Project Gigabit progress update (here), the government’s scheme is currently running live contracts and procurements worth over £2bn in state aid to help extend coverage to an extra 1.1 million hard to reach premises. But this is still increasingly and so does not represent a final tally (about £0.5bn and 330,000 premises were added to that total last year alone).

Across all publicly funded programmes (not only Project Gigabit), more than 929,000 hard-to-reach premises have already got access to gigabit broadband as a result of government support. Ofcom’s own modelling currently predicts that UK gigabit broadband coverage will reach around 84% by May 2024, then 91% by May 2025 and 94% by May 2026 (here).

Technology Secretary, Michelle Donelan MP, said:

“This is another giant leap forward in our mission to bring gigabit connectivity to every part of the UK, with 80% of the country now able to benefit from lightning-fast broadband.

Access to gigabit speeds does not just mean being able to seamlessly stream films, TV shows, and shop online all at once. It means better productivity for businesses and new opportunities for local communities with digital infrastructure which will help power our economy, create jobs and improve lives for decades to come.”

Finally, the government’s announcement notes that there is now a market of over 100 providers (alternative networks and major providers) “investing more than £40 billion to roll out gigabit-capable broadband across the UK”. However, it should be said that figures like £40bn are often more reflective of tentative commitments and, much as we’ve seen during 2023, some of those commitments are at risk of falling short due to rising build costs and other pressures.

In particular, we’ve seen a good number of operators recently announcing job cuts, as well as build pauses and slowdowns. As a result, progress in 2024 may be a bit slower than prior forecasts envisaged, although Project Gigabit’s first 85% target still looks achievable. But getting to c.99% is a much tougher job.