New PC game Broadband Architect where you run a UK altnet set to launch
A new single player tycoon management style PC game is set to launch very soon called Broadband Architect, which is a commercial title available via Steam that will allow you to run a small UK alternative broadband network against a satirical incumbent called “BritTelec“. No relation, we’re sure, to another operator of perhaps not dissimilar naming conventions 🙂 .
Regular readers might recall that somebody else previously launched a free web browser-based game that attempted to do something similar (here), although that was relatively simplistic. By comparison this is the first full commercial PC game to create a management sim about the often-unglamorous machinery of getting fibre into people’s houses.
“Britain’s broadband is a mess, and you’re the small company that says it can do better. Trench real UK streets, wire real homes to fibre, and size your network against the 8pm evening peak — when the whole town logs on at once. Dig up Britain. Sell broadband. Survive the evening peak,” says the official description on Steam’s page for Broadband Architect.
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The game is the creation of Gloucestershire-based Tom Lee, a solo developer who has spent the past 9 months or so piecing it all together. The game is said to be built on real streets (built from OpenStreetMap data) and is due to enter the early access phase in “late” November 2026. The initial demo will focus on Cheltenham, Bishops Cleeve, and the surrounding areas, although the full game will cover the entire UK.
Players will have to trench the streets, argue with landlords to install in blocks of flats (MDU), work out with landowners’ wayleaves and install the infrastructure to cope with demand. The game’s timeline runs from 2012, with internet demand changing over time and evening and daytime peaks depending on your customer base.
The inspiration for all this came from Tom’s own experience with having FTTP deploy to his community: “FTTP was installed across my village but not my road. Three years later I was finally offered it, and it then took nine months of back-and-forth between Openreach and my ISP (who were great) to get it installed. Even now, with fibre on both telegraph poles on my road, some of my neighbours still can’t order it. In my day job, I’m Chief Systems Engineer, and we went through something similar when we got FTTP to one of our production sites,” said Tom to ISPreview.
A demo of the new game is due to be presented at the Steam Next Fest (19th – 26th October) event next month. At the time of writing, it’s not yet clear how much the game will cost to buy, although titles like this are usually very affordable.
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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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Well that’s BT Ivor’s Christmas pressie sorted!
Wonderful day!
Oh… I am sorry, but I won’t adventure this one.
The character, the UI look as AI-slop.
If it actually is LLM-generated… why do you degrade the human infinitely magnificent history?
The AI disclosure on the steam page says this:
“Some current artworks are AI-generated as well as ingame assets, However before full relaase all AI Generated artwork will be replaced.”
Tom here that’s fair, and the disclosure is accurate: some of the in-game graphics and some of the writing were made with AI help, because it’s a one-person project and I can’t draw. The store art was commissioned from an artist, the maps are real OpenStreetMap data, and the music is licensed. If the demo does well, the plan is to pay for professional artwork for the game itself.
I think I might take out a loan for £500 million, play around for 3 years, then hand it half-finished to another player for a quid
#keepingitreal
Very early or late for April fools.
“At the time of writing, it’s not yet clear how much the game will cost to buy”
Or whether there is any way to win.
The only winning move is not to play.
The win state is obv the “Nixxed Network Buyout” – along with a stream achievement. Where the evil national network “Vermin Multicast” offers you twice the “per perm passed” cost you paid out to screw over a rival network!
Tom here. In the full release, there are two winning moves: not playing, or be the last altnet standing. Jack’s not far off: buying out a rival is very much a move you can make. No Vermin Multicast in the game, though… yet. The main opponent is BritTeleco, who have been about to fibre your road since 2012. “Nixxed Network Buyout” is going on my list of achievement ideas.
On price: I haven’t announced it yet, but I plan to keep it reasonable
I think this looks brilliant, well done Tom!
Thanks Alex, really appreciate it!
This is genuinely the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while and I think I might actually give it a try for the fun of it.
Hmm, I could play this game at cost unknown or I could just continue to do this as my day job and get paid for the privilege 😉
Finding it funny someone has written a game to simulate my job!
Anon (obviously)
You’re exactly who I’d most like to hear from. If you try the demo, tell me what I’ve got wrong. People who do the job for real are the best testers I could ask for. Though it might just be me who does your day job for fun after work.
I’d be happy to give it a go, I used to work in this exact industry (ran network engineering in an altnet) and been following full fibre development since the early 2010’s…
Also Anon for obvious reasons.
“Though it might just be me who does your day job for fun after work.”
@tom I dunno, cosy work sims can take off. I mean PowerWash Simulator did gang busters!
hell yeah Gloucestershire representation
I’m willing to bet the sole audience for this will be all the BB engineers and architects nerdy enough to want to sit there and pick holes in the processes…”well actually Tom, it doesn’t work like that, what you need is…..”
I might actually try this out. I like that it’s the whole of the UK with real roads, not fictitious ones. Looking forward to the release 🙂
i wonder if we can build a network better than what is already there, then THEY can take note
Can’t wait to go to a town and just do like 5 streets then, go to another town do most of it but miss out like a few houses just to keep it real, hopefully has loaning im going ti be rich!