BDUK Reopens Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme to Devon UK UPDATE
The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has made a change today that re-opens their Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS) for parts of Devon in England, which means that local homes and businesses in poorly served rural areas can apply for big grants to help get a much faster broadband ISP network installed.
Just to recap. The GBVS usually 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 1-2 years (i.e. it’s not currently available to most counties), which is largely to ensure 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).
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The good news today is that BDUK have updated their GBVS availability page to re-add Devon (South West England) back into the table, which is currently supported by several region-specific voucher suppliers – Openreach, Technological Services, Evolve and Bush Broadband.
The move is useful as it comes after Airband scaled-back their state-aid supported FTTP broadband deployment contract under the Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) programme in 2024 (here), which also followed the termination of Truespeed’s similar deal in 2022 (here). Suffice to say that some locations negatively affected by those terminations may be able to benefit from vouchers.
The GBVS is currently also available to poorly served parts of Derbyshire, the Isle of Wight, Newcastle and North Tyneside, Greater London, Merseyside and Great Manchester, Birmingham and the Black Country.
UPDATE 12th Feb 2025 @ 9am
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Industry sources have informed us of a caveat in this development, which is that BDUK have a deadline for voucher project submissions of 7th April 2025, following which the Funding Platform will close for new projects. Suffice to say that suppliers don’t have long to submit their voucher builds.
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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So does this conflict / work with the Openreach Type 6C contract for West Devon?
The usual approach is to exclude the project gigabit GIS contracted build areas from voucher availability. Essentially, areas where the service exists today or is planned to be built within the next c.3 years (commercially or via state aid) will not be eligible for vouchers.
Thanks Mark, email updates from Open reach recently showed are postcode to be upgraded by Dec’26 to Ultra fast, then now shows Not Available…time will tell .
Here in E Devon, there’s a big chunk of properties in my village that were in the failed Airband contract. But that contract was still nominally in place when the Type ‘C’ Openreach contract was in negotiation, so to the best of my knowledge those properties were excluded from that contract.
The likelihood (although I’m still waiting confirmation) is that the result is that properties upgraded by BDUK Phase 1 (VDSL cab put in and EO lines, wot they all are, rerouted) are in-scope of the Type ‘C’ contract, that being “gigabit”, not “superfast”, but the ADSL-supplied properties are out.
This announcement will, hopefully, “fix” that. Now to see who we can get to supply us in a non-geological timescale.
The interesting question is who’s influence has brought this about. Local MPs? CDS? Mine?
Poor old Devon, well messed about. Please excuse me going slightly off topic but do altnets get paid if the householder does not take a contract with them?
By “altnets”, I assume you mean the chosen supplier for a particular community/voucher build? So if a property owner takes out a voucher, then that commits them to taking a service from the chosen supplier once the network is built. The network operator then uses its own money to build the network and must then claim the vouchers to help cover that cost post-build.
Now there are some complexities here around whether or not you’re taking your service from one of several ISPs on a wholesale network, or from the network operator itself via vertical integration. So it depends on what you’re asking in the detail. But the supplier will have their own viability model for take-up (this will allow for changes, such as with people who back out etc.), and of course the network will often pass more premises than those who take the voucher.
Thanks, that clarifies things.
A bit challenging to get a quote on those timescales from bust providers, but may be useful for the odd oven ready project.
*busy
Our village in mid-devon essentially gave up and are just waiting on generic rollouts in the future, whenever that may be. Even with vouchers, the costs were eye watering. By our last openreach quote, we needed 99% of all properties to provide a voucher before they would consider a build. clearly, not viable. According to Openreach, we are still not on their roadmap to update. I’m sure we are in there at the bottom, but nowhere near getting any action taken. Until then, Starlink it is. None of the other providers targeting Devon are building here either. AirBand said they would only come to our village if we got the surrounding towns on fibre first, again not viable.. so we’re out of options other than LEO sats until whenever somebody does a native build… aka bottom of the list.
Hi Mark,
Not sure how public or relevant this is but it does not seem possible to check eligibility for a postcode or property until you ask one of the participating suppliers in each broad geographical area on the BDUK list on that link.
That’s going to take someone a while to find out if they have to check individually with say five suppliers in Devon for example. There is no contact point within each supplier so any queries to suppliers for GBVS eligibility may disappear into a rabbit hole of contact points.
Is there a way to suggest to your contacts that BDUK edit their content to allow households/ consumers to find their eligibility using a link on the BDUK site/page itself perhaps?
Otherwise suspect there won’t be much resulting traction from this content or announcement from BDUK considering the very short deadline before this processes closes down.
Hope it helps.
The small window suggests that BDUK found some budget down the back of a sofa that needs committing before the end of this financial year.
I’m thinking that beyond a few premises in or close to the non-Openreach providers, the impact of this will be zero.
Probably saw an opportunity to try to reduce adverse publicity over the Gigabit Type C contract covering BDUK Phase 1 VDSL-provided properties but not ADSL ones abandoned by Gigacler/Airband/CDS.