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Six major internet infrastructure contracts worth more than £450m have been awarded, allowing suppliers to begin surveying work to connect around 236,000 premises across England.
According to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), over £1bn in contracts has now been issued through the government’s Project Gigabit programme, connecting a total of 677,000 rural homes and businesses to full fibre networks.
Project Gigabit is the government’s programme to connect hard-to-reach areas that would otherwise miss out on the industry’s roll-out of faster, more reliable ‘gigabit-capable’ broadband.
In its last manifesto, the Conservative Party promised to install full fibre, gigabit-capable broadband in every home and business across the UK by 2025. This was later downgraded to 85% of properties, although as of late 2023 just over 57% of UK homes were able to access full-fibre broadband connections.
MPs have previously criticised the government for the slow roll-out of fibre broadband and 5G mobile networks.
DSIT said the first homes to benefit from the newly announced funding should be connected to fibre broadband by early 2025.
Five of the latest contracts will be delivered by broadband provider CityFibre, serving rural communities in Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Sussex, Kent, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes. A further contract to upgrade premises in Nottinghamshire and West Lincolnshire has been awarded to Hull-based supplier Connexin.
Full fibre is capable of delivering speeds of up to 1,000Mbps (or 1Gbps) – up to 30 times faster than superfast connections that rely on traditional copper cables.
The upgrades have been posited as a way to help grow the economy in rural areas and create jobs.
“We’re wasting no time in our mission to bring lightning-fast broadband to rural areas – with a billion pounds in contracts already signed with broadband companies to get our next-generation network up and running,” said digital infrastructure minister Julia Lopez.
“Project Gigabit is already driving growth, creating jobs and putting an end to snail’s-pace internet speeds, and we will continue to work rapidly to ensure people feel the benefits of our roll-out to even more places across the UK as quickly as possible.”
Greg Mesch, CityFibre CEO, said: “We’re continuing to expand our commercial roll-out alongside Project Gigabit, extending infrastructure choice, multi-gigabit speeds, and unparalleled reliability to hundreds of thousands of additional premises in these regions.”
As a result of the investment, CityFibre committed to offer 40 apprenticeships – a minimum of eight a year – across the UK in telecoms and highways maintenance for the duration of the contract.
