Government to Expand UK Availability of Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme
Good news. The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency will shortly announce that more areas of the United Kingdom are to be re-opened to the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS), which means that homes and businesses in poorly served areas will be able to apply for funding to help get faster internet connections installed.
The GBVS typically offers grants worth up to £4,500 to help both rural and some poorly served urban premises (homes and businesses) to get a gigabit-capable broadband (1Gbps) ISP service installed. This is available to areas with existing broadband 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).
At present the availability of this scheme is limited to parts of Derbyshire, Birmingham and the Black Country, Merseyside and Greater Manchester, Greater London, Scotland and the Isle of Wight. The restriction is partly to avoid the voucher scheme clashing with Project Gigabit’s larger subsidised delivery contracts, although this is a constantly changing situation and so sometimes the current rules do need updating.
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According to our sources, BDUK has identified through supplier engagement that premises in parts of Cambridgeshire, Dorset, Newcastle and North Tyneside, Norfolk, North East England and Wales are now suitable for opening to the GBVS. This will give designated broadband suppliers in each area the opportunity to identify and deliver new voucher projects.
In addition, more premises will also be opened to vouchers across existing areas, including Shropshire, Birmingham and the Black Country, Greater London, and Merseyside and Manchester. At present this change is not being reflected via the GBVS website, but ISPreview understands that this will happen very soon.
BDUK Supplier Notice
Suppliers are reminded that … any new voucher projects or changes to existing projects submitted across any of these new areas or any existing areas open to vouchers will be prioritised if they can be delivered, and all voucher funding can be claimed, before April 2027. Suppliers with approved GBVS projects that continue to deliver connections and draw down voucher funding to agreed milestones are not impacted by this prioritisation.
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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The area where I live is listed on this page: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gigabit-broadband-voucher-scheme-information/gigabit-broadband-voucher-scheme-information However, there is no Active GBVS supplier shown for my area. The street where I live currently only has Openreach FTTC. OR FTTP and VMO2 DOCSIS cable ends about 150 metres away. Cityfibre covers some parts of the area but is about a mile away from this street. My question is: which GBVS suppliers should I contact?
Great. I was Broadband Champion for Ellington and managed to get vouchers for Openreach to rollout but we could not get the next village, Ellington Thorpe, included as it is served by a different exchange.
Things have become more complex as Ellington now has Openreach fibre, Grafham (served by another exchange) has Gigaclear Fibre and Ellington Thorpe is stick in the middle at the end of a long line from Buckden exchange. To complicate matters further it is in the middle of the CityFibre Cambridge & Peterborough lot.
This sounds like the fibre-les island that this new Voucher programme can address. I’ve asked Connecting Cambridgeshire to help!
The fibre broadband roll out is frankly pathetic. For a major western economy it’s ludicrous that much of the UK still is limited to telephone copper Internet. Here in Gloucestershire (not included in the voucher scheme) it’s a real lottery of whether you will ever get fttp or not. In my road there is nothing, no virgin fibre, no bt fibre just phone based 35 mbps (on a good day). Often we are down at sub 1 mbps. Based on the open reach map we are on the very edge of an area that might eventually get fttp, a few yards away it shows there is no planned fttp at all. Yet Gloucestershire is ineligible for these vouchers.
South Korea had 1.5gbs fibre network installed nationwide twenty years ago, that’s how far behind the UK is. It’s particularly concerning that the UK is only now installing a peacemeal system of such low capability.
The UK currently has the fastest full-fibre roll-out in Europe.
The initial roll-out was hindered by a number of circumstances outside the control of the providers.