BDUK Issue Annual Update on UK Project Gigabit Broadband Progress | ISPreview UK

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The Government’s (DSIT) Building Digital UK agency has today published their annual progress report on the £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout scheme, which covers the April 2024 to March 2025 period and reveals that related interventions delivered 152,700 premises with gigabit-capable coverage during this period (total so far of 1.227m – including past schemes/years).

At present around 88% of UK premises can already access a gigabit-capable network (here) and Ofcom separately forecasts that this could hit c.97% by May 2027 (here). Most of this has been delivered by commercial deployments (predominantly focused on urban and semi-urban areas), but there are some areas in the final 10-20% of premises that are simply too expensive for commercial providers to tackle.

Project Gigabit itself was originally established in 2021 to help extend broadband ISP networks capable of delivering download speeds of at least 1000Mbps (1Gbps), and uploads of at least 200Mbps, to achieve “nationwide” coverage (c.99%) by 2030 2032 (here) – focusing on the commercially unviable areas (usually rural and semi-rural locations). The project has already committed most of its budget up to 2030, but there are still some contracts yet to be awarded and others that have failed or been scaled-back (here, here and here).

The latest update builds on BDUK’s recent July 2025 update, although that one was a partial progress update for the year, as it only included data for the April to December 2024 period. By comparison, this one represents the full year of progress and includes data up to the end of March 2025.

However, somewhat annoyingly, BDUK has decided to exclude the table showing contractual delivery by contract and supplier in this release, which was present in the prior update. But we understand that this is because they’re planning to “release contractual delivery information as management information on a monthly basis in a transparent and regular way” in the very near future. So we’ll keep an eye out for that as it’s the most important bit.

Summary of the latest BDUK data

Of the premises delivered by BDUK between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025: 

• 41% (62,760) were delivered under the Gigabit Infrastructure Subsidy scheme (GIS, Gigabit contracts) 
• 37% (55,740) were delivered by vouchers (gigabit broadband voucher scheme)
• 22% (34,200) were delivered by Superfast (older SFBB contracts) and Hubs (Dark Fibre for public sector sites etc.)
• 89% (135,900) of premises delivered between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025 were in rural areas.  
• 91% (139,000) of premises delivered between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025 were classified as residential premises and 8% (12,000) were classified as commercial premises. 
• The highest delivery was in England (67%, 101,800 premises) followed by Scotland (23%, 34,700 premises), Wales (7%, 10,700 premises), and Northern Ireland (4%, 5,500 premises). 

The spreadsheets also include some additional data and a regional breakdown of the figures, some of which we’ve included below. One key thing to note below is that Project Gigabit itself has still only delivered a relatively small amount of gigabit coverage, with the earlier ‘Superfast Broadband Programme‘ (SFBB) still holding the lion’s share (largely because that has run for many years longer).

BDUK – Gigabit Premises Passed by Year, Country and Region

Finally, BDUK said they were also investigating their vouchers data quality. “We have identified that our primary approach to collecting vouchers data has diminished in quality, and may be resulting in a small underestimate of vouchers delivery for recent months“. But otherwise we’ll have to wait a bit longer before BDUK published a more useful update on the latest progress by each Project Gigabit contract.