Gov Reopens Gigabit Broadband Vouchers in Part of Derbyshire UK

The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency made a change this week that has re-opened their Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS) for parts of Derbyshire in England, which means that local homes and businesses in poorly served rural areas can apply for grants worth up to £7,500 to help get a much faster broadband ISP network installed.

Just to recap. The GBVS usually only offers grants worth up to £4,500 to help rural premises get a gigabit-capable broadband (1Gbps) ISP service installed, which is available to areas with speeds of “less than 100Mbps” – assuming there are also no near-term plans for a gigabit deployment in the same area (either via private investment or state-aid).

However, the GBVS has been operating with a very low level of UK availability for the past year (i.e. it’s not currently available to most counties), which is largely so that it avoids conflicting (i.e. duplicating / wasting public investment) with Project Gigabit’s larger Gigabit Infrastructure Subsidy (GIS) programme (i.e. the big build contracts that have been awarded to operators like Fibrus, Openreach, Wessex Internet and many others).

The good news this week is that BDUK updated their GBVS availability page to re-add “Derbyshire (partial areas)” back into the table, which is currently listing two voucher suppliers for that area – Openreach and E-volve (suppliers vary by region). Similarly, Thinkbroadband has spotted a press release from the local authority (here), which confirms that they’ve provided top-up funding to boost the value of local vouchers up to £7.5k, enabling them to reach even deeper into rural areas.

Councillor Carolyn Renwick said:

“We are committed to improving broadband access, speed and reliability for homes and businesses across the county and particularly in rural areas.

Residents and businesses are relying on the internet more than ever before and we’re continuing to play a key role in helping to deliver next-generation broadband to make sure local people can continue to operate and engage in an ever-changing digital world.

A number of Derbyshire communities have already benefitted from the voucher scheme and this new ‘top-up’ funding means more homes and businesses in the hardest to reach locations of Derbyshire can take advantage of the scheme.”

The only uncertainly is around the use of that “partial areas” language, as it’s not immediately clear how BDUK and the local authority are defining the limitations for this. In theory, we should start to see more areas re-opening for vouchers, particularly as it becomes clearer which contracted build areas will be reached via the GIS programme and which will not.