Project Gigabit is a third of the way through its contracted homes
Every month the government publishes a scorecard for the broadband it is paying to have built in the places no company was going to reach on its own. The August update went up on Monday, and it puts Project Gigabit at 296,770 premises connected out of 846,770 under contract. That is just over a third of the work, and the figures are Building Digital UK’s own, not somebody’s estimate.
The national total is the least useful number in it. Project Gigabit is not one build but around forty separate contracts, and they run from finished to not started. Wildanet has completed Central Cornwall and South West Cornwall, GoFibre has finished Durham and Northumberland, and Freedom Fibre has finished North Shropshire. Fibrus is at 37,060 premises of 53,540 in Cumbria. Openreach’s Cheshire contract still reads zero. If your address sits inside one of these builds, the county line is the one that tells you anything.
Northern Ireland is in the table for the first time, with Fibrus contracted for 9,330 premises there and 2,490 of them built. That matters for the maths. This month is not a clean comparison with July’s 287,510, because part of the rise is data that simply was not in the previous table.
Seven contract areas show fewer built premises than they did last month, among them Openreach’s largest call-off contract and both of Gigaclear’s Oxfordshire builds. Nobody has been disconnected. BDUK says suppliers have resubmitted their delivery data, that the removed records are due to be re-added later, and that the change is an update to administrative data rather than a change in delivery performance.
The honest limit sits in BDUK’s own notes. The table is a snapshot of what it held on 17 August, there is a variable lag between a connection being delivered and it being counted, the numbers are rounded to the nearest ten, and BDUK says plainly that they should not be used to judge whether a contract has met its milestones. So this is a gauge of a programme, not an answer about a street. For a single address there is the availability checker, and if the waiting is the real question, how a rollout actually reaches a street covers why the last stretch takes the longest.
Worth watching next month: whether the removed premises come back, and whether the contracts still in low single figures start to move. As reported by ISPreview, the scheme is aimed at getting gigabit networks to almost every UK premises by 2032. Two thirds of the homes this money has already been committed to are still waiting, which makes the pace of the slow contracts the thing that decides whether that date holds.