DSIT says this brings fibre broadband investment this year so far to £714m but it’s still only spent £1.3bn in total of the £5bn promised in 2019
The UK’s Department for Science, Technology & Innovation (DSIT) has announced a further £165 million to bring fibre broadband to almost 380,000 premises this year. They are in rural areas, including parts of Devon and the Isles of Scilly, South Yorkshire, the Peak District (pictured), Cornwall and Somerset.
The contracts have been awarded to:
- South Yorkshire – Quickline awarded £44.4 million to connect 32,100 premises
- West Herefordshire and the Forest of Dean – FullFibre awarded £23.4 million to connect 7,900 premises
- Peak District – FullFibre awarded £10.7 million to connect 4,400 premises
- Dorset and South Somerset –Wessex Internet awarded £33.5 million to connect 21,400 premises
- Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly – Wildanet awarded £41.2 million to connect 16,800 premises
- Mid-west Shropshire – Voneus awarded £12 million to connect 6,000 premises.
The investment is part of the UK Government’s is still calling its “£5 billion Project Gigabit programme” which was rebranded as such in March 2021. The plan was to bring fast broadband (up to 1Gbps) to hard to reach areas that are typically not densely populated. So far, the total invested is 1.3 billion.
However, before the General Election in 2019, the Tory government promised it would contribute £5 billion to get gigabit coverage to the 20% of the country’s population that are hard to reach, to ensure the whole country had gigabit access by 2025.
In October 2020, the government said it would release only £1.2 billion by 2025 and lowered the target to 85% coverage of the population, but said it was open to ideas from network providers to hand out more.
Almost 82% of properties across the UK now have access to fast broadband, up from 7% five years ago, according to the DSIT statement.
Not so fast
Although the Minister for Data and Digital Julia Lopez said, “The figures published today demonstrate how rapidly we are delivering higher quality gigabit broadband to every part of the country – even some of the most remote rural areas,” the government is not principally responsible for the dramatic acceleration in deployment.
Given that the intention was announced in 2019, getting started in 2022 was in fact slow, pandemic notwithstanding.
The Government has also awarded separate contracts to connect up to 800 primary schools in England, jointly funded through Project Gigabit and the Department for Education.