BDUK Close Gigabit Broadband Vouchers to Devon and Somerset UK
As expected, following our earlier report (here), the Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has today confirmed that their Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS) has now closed for new voucher projects in Devon and Somerset (England).
Just to recap. The GBVS usually offers grants worth up to £4,500 to help 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). This previously only offered vouchers to rural areas, but it was recently expanded to include urban locations (here).
However, the GBVS has been operating on a low level of UK availability for the past couple of years (i.e. it’s not currently available to most counties), which is partly to ensure that it avoids conflicting (i.e. duplicating / wasting public money) 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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Back in February 2025 the GBVS was re-opened to voucher projects in Devon (South West England), which was handy as it followed shortly after the scaling-back and abandonment of several deployment contracts under the separate Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) programme (here and here). The sting in the tail was that BDUK only re-opened the voucher scheme until 7th April 2025, which didn’t leave much time for new projects to proceed.
BDUK has today confirmed that the Funding Platform for both Devon and Somerset has closed for new voucher projects. The hope is that the wider Project Gigabit scheme, whether via future deployments or expansions of existing contracts, should still be able to reach most of the poorly served areas in both counties. Time will tell. But the voucher scheme may yet return to the region.
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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It’ll be interesting to see how many properties get vouchers under this brief opening. I feel an FoI coming on in a few months’ time.
Openreach, despite being listed as one of the suppliers, told our Parish Council that they weren’t progressing any new Fibre Community Partnership schemes. So quite why they were listed as a supplier under the scheme is incomprehensible. Wasted everyone’s time.
2 of the other suppliers were only operating in small, specific areas (one apparently very, very small), which left only one as an actual option.
It really was truly bizarre.