Derbyshire County Council Commits £900k to Plug Rural Broadband Gaps

The Derbyshire County Council (DCC) in England has agreed to invest £900,000 to support the launch of two grant programmes, which will aim to improve broadband connectivity in at least some of the communities – predominantly rural ones – that are currently still expected to miss out on access to faster connections.

At present UK ISP Connect Fibre holds the main £33m (public subsidy) Project Gigabit contract for Derbyshire (LOT 3), which will see them expanding their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to serve an additional 17,000+ premises in hard-to-reach rural areas (i.e. communities such as Eckington, Hulland Ward, Shirley and many more).

In addition, a second £10.7m Project Gigabit contract for the Peak District was also held by network operator FullFibre Limited (Fibre Heroes), which would have covered 4,400 premises (including some in Derbyshire). Unfortunately, FullFibre Ltd pulled out of that contract back in May 2025 (here), but even if both contracts had reached completion, then Derbyshire will still be left with a gap to fill.

According to the DCC, around 32,000 premises (homes and businesses) across the county still receive broadband speeds of less than 100Mbps in areas with no prospect of commercial providers rolling out full fibre within the next 3 years. Of these, around 3,000 premises are still receiving very slow speeds of less than 10Mbps (the level of the Universal Service Obligation).

The county council’s cabinet have thus approved the use of £900k in funding “from our Digital Derbyshire reserves” to set up 2 grant programmes to boost broadband speeds in premises with some of the poorest performing internet connections.

Summary of the New Grant Schemes

The ‘Gigabit Fibre Connectivity Grant’ will provide a full fibre network to clusters of ‘hard to reach’ premises which are close to one another.

And the ‘Interim Connectivity Grant’ will focus on providing short-term solutions, such as satellite or mobile broadband, to properties which:

• are in remote areas where delivery of a fixed full fibre network is too expensive and there is no commercial roll-out planned
• currently use outdated copper-only lines which are only capable of a maximum of 24Mbps.

The council added that they would be continuing to “push” the East Midlands Combined County Authority (EMCCA) to “prepare proposals for its digital programme and identify appropriate funding to help improve broadband speeds in more homes and businesses in Derbyshire in the future“.

Carol Wood, DCC Cabinet Member for Net Zero and Environment, said:

“Decent broadband is essential to every-day life and something many of us take for granted. But we know that having a reliable internet connection is a postcode lottery with many businesses and residents in rural areas still losing out.

By launching these two grant programmes, we can help improve broadband speeds for lots of local people and help prevent rural communities from falling behind in the digital divide.”

The catch in all this is that, in the grander scheme of building full fibre broadband networks, the allocation of £900,000 is just a drop in the ocean. The funding is roughly enough to hook up a couple of small villages or around 300-600 premises – assuming a rural focus. The expansion to include alternative methods of connectivity via the “interim” grant is welcome, although we don’t yet have any details on precisely how that will be structured.

We should point out that the government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (vouchers worth up to £4,500 per property) is currently also available to poorly served remote rural premises in Derbyshire, which is being supported by the following suppliers: Dragon Wifi, E-volve Solutions, GigaPeak, Openreach and WeFibre. The DCC might thus do well to combine their focus with that of the GBVS.