New independent data has revealed that 85.06% of premises across the United Kingdom can now access a gigabit-capable broadband ISP connection (1000Mbps+), which is up from 80% at the end of 2023 and means the first target under the Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit programme has likely been achieved. The figure drops to 70.84% when only looking at full fibre (FTTP) lines.
As usual, it’s necessary to point out that the figure for “gigabit-capable broadband” coverage is currently much higher than full fibre (FTTP) because it includes both the impact from FTTP builds and Virgin Media’s Hybrid Fibre Coax (Cable / DOCSIS 3.1) network, as well as a bit of FTTB. All of these can deliver gigabit download speeds, and there’s a lot of overbuild between them in urban areas (Virgin will upgrade all their coax to FTTP by 2028).
The vast majority of this rapid network expansion is currently still being dominated by commercial deployments from numerous network operators, such as Openreach (BT), Virgin Media (O2 + Nexfibre), CityFibre, Netomnia, Hyperoptic, Gigaclear and many more (Summary of UK Full Fibre Builds).
The progress also bodes particularly well for the Government’s Project Gigabit programme, which for the past few years has been aiming to extend 1Gbps download speeds (200Mbps+ uploads) to cover at least 85% of UK premises by 2025, before hopefully achieving “nationwide” coverage (c. 99%) by around 2030 (here).
The project focuses upon the final 10-20% of hardest to reach premises (5-6 million premises exist within this area, but they won’t all need help from public funding) and we usually tend to interpret “by 2025” as meaning one of two things – A) completion by the end of a financial year (i.e. March 2025), or B) completion by the end of a calendar year (i.e. Dec 2025). The fact we’ve hit this figure today suggests Project Gigabit is a little bit ahead of schedule.
Looking forward, Ofcom’s study of Planned Network Deployments recently predicted (here) that full fibre (FTTP) broadband ISP lines are currently on course to cover 95-96% of all UK properties by May 2027 (29 million premises), which rises to around 97-98% for “gigabit-capable broadband” networks (FTTP and HFC).
However, none of this will mean anything to those of you who still live in poorly served areas (often rural locations and some patches in urban locations), where the wait for something better to arrive continues to be a slow and painful one. But the fact is that the country is continuing to see both rapid and dramatic progress in the roll-out of these networks, which is making for an ever-smaller gap left to fill.