CityFibre Respond to Question of Slow UK Project Gigabit Broadband Progress

Network builder CityFibre has told ISPreview that they are making “good progress” on a number of their contracted Project Gigabit deployments, including those where recent data appears to show that the roll-out of their full fibre (FTTP) network has slowed to a crawl. But despite this the operator says they’re still meeting (and exceeding) their contractual obligations.

In case it’s been overlooked, ISPreview has recently been paying much closer attention to the roll-out progress of the government’s £5bn Project Gigabit scheme, which began last year after the associated Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency finally started releasing regular progress updates on each contract.

The most recent monthly update to this was posted on 19th March 2026 (here) and, since then, a number of our readers have been querying why there seems to have been little to no significant roll-out progress on several of CityFibre’s contracts over the past few months.

Particular concerns were raised about the following two contracts, although a few others were also mentioned as appearing to be quite slow, at least when measured against the progress of other altnets. Both of the two highlighted contracts have been in the build phase for over a year and so would normally be in their ramping-up phase (i.e. delivery usually gets faster, not slower).

Example CityFibre Contracts

Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes – £51m (Lot 12)

Contracted Premises: 21,030

Built Contracted Premises: 2,800 (13% Complete)

Premises Added in March 2026: 0

Premises Added in February 2026: 60

East and West Sussex – £108m (Lot 16 & 1)

Contracted Premises: 41,940

Built Contracted Premises: 2,970 (7% Complete)

Premises Added in March 2026: 0

Premises Added in February 2026: 10

At the start of this year there was some speculation that these and other contracts could have been impacted by CityFibre’s recent redundancies (here). But the network operator has previously denied this and stated that they “remain committed to our role in Project Gigabit and will have the resources needed to deliver.” Lest we also forget that much of the actual build will be coming from the operator’s contractors, not their internal teams.

Naturally we were curious about the reasons for this pace of build (or absence of it) and asked CityFibre for an update. Crucially the operator informed ISPreview that they are currently meeting (and even exceeding) their contractual obligations in these areas, with the roll-out continuing throughout this month and beyond.

In addition, it’s noted, also by BDUK, that there can be a variable time lag between delivery and data ingestion / confirmation by BDUK (i.e. the figures should not be used to assess whether contractual milestones have been met). For example, CityFibre are understood to have released a number of additional premises throughout February and March that are not yet reflected in BDUK’s published figures (the admin side takes time).

A CityFibre spokesperson said:

“Since we began work, CityFibre has made good progress across our Project Gigabit lots and reached over 140,000 premises in rural and harder-to-reach areas, through a combination of commercial and subsidised build. We continue to work closely with BDUK, informed by the Open Market Review, to bring the benefits of full fibre to as many people as possible.”

A DSIT spokesperson said:

“While build progress can vary between contracts, overall delivery of Project Gigabit remains strong – recently achieving its highest build rate since the programme launched in 2021.

We continue to work with all Project Gigabit suppliers to ensure fast, reliable broadband reaches hard‑to‑reach communities, keeping our focus on delivering nationwide gigabit coverage by 2032.”

Just to give an example of how much of an impact the above scenarios can have – the Fibrus contract for Cumbria also delivered 0 premises in the most recent monthly update, but the month before they delivered 2,030. Sometimes there can be a strong variation in the monthly ebb and flow of progress due to both changes in build activity and admin delays, which means we’ll need to pay attention over a longer span of time before being able to better assess the progress of different operators. Hopefully this gives our readers some useful extra context when looking at these monthly updates from BDUK.

On top of this ISPreview also queried about the status of CityFibre’s £58.6m (public subsidy) Project Gigabit contract for Nottinghamshire and West Lincolnshire (Lot 10), which regular readers may recall has been stuck in limbo for a full year, after it was inherited as part of the operator’s acquisition of Connexin (here).

However, it remains unclear when we’ll see some real build activity on Lot 10, as CityFibre still seems to be engaged in discussions with BDUK. A CityFibre spokesperson said: “We continue to engage with BDUK to confirm the opportunity ahead in Nottinghamshire and West Lincolnshire, which CityFibre took on as part of our acquisition of Connexin’s full fibre infrastructure.”