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In a small but interesting update, the Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has announced a string of new studies to evaluate the performance, delivery and value of its various mobile and broadband roll-out programmes – including Project Gigabit (subsidy and vouchers), Local Full Fibre Networks (LFFN), Shared Rural Network (SRN) and GigaHubs (extension of LFFN).
According to the first brief, BDUK has commissioned Winning Moves, Belmana and Darren Kilburn to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of waves 2 and 3 of the £200m Local Full Fibre Networks (LFFN) programme (wave 1 was already evaluated), which helped to extend fibre optic networks to public sector sites. The same network could also be harnessed to help improve local business and home broadband connectivity, albeit requiring separate private investment. The follow-on GigaHubs scheme, under Project Gigabit, will also be separately evaluated by Belmana, Hatch and GC Insights (here).
The second brief reveals that BDUK has commissioned Ipsos UK and partners to undertake an evaluation of the £1bn industry-led Shared Rural Network (SRN) Programme, which has helped to extend geographic 4G mobile coverage from ‘at least one operator’ to 95% of the UK and will continue to expand until the start of 2027. This project involved both the construction of new masts and the sharing of existing ones between the operators.
The third brief confirms that BDUK has commissioned Ipsos UK and partners to undertake an evaluation of their headline £5bn Project Gigabit scheme, which includes the Gigabit Infrastructure Subsidy (GIS) interventions and the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS). The overall goal of this has been to help extend gigabit broadband to c.99% of premises by 2032 (recently delayed from the original target of 2030).
Such evaluations are typically conducted periodically, usually once a programme has been up and running for a while (i.e. so there’s actually something to evaluate in the first place). The prior Superfast Broadband (SFBB) programme saw several evaluations and so did related schemes (examples here, here and here), so this is really just a continuation of that approach.