EXCLUSIVE: 85% Gigabit coverage reached – the journey since 2018

The original goal of Project Gigabit may have flexed when it was in its early stages, with some controversy when it fell from as close to 100% for 2025 back to 85%, but for the last few years, it has been a firm target of 85% coverage of premises across the UK.

Our tracking actually hit 85.01% on 1st October 2024 and was just a few hundred premises shy of that on 30th September 2024. So, the UK has reached its goal ahead of 2025, and this is a combined effort from the commercial roll-outs, Gigabit vouchers, and Project Gigabit contracts. Without any one of those three things, we would be looking at waiting longer to declare the total being reached.

UK broadband has been an easy target for criticism due to the focus on high levels of superfast coverage delivered largely by part-fibre (FTTC) in the 2010 to 2020 period, but after many years of smaller full fibre deployments, late in 2018, we started to see a distinct change and in early 2019 our daily tracking started adding a few thousand additional premises passed by full-fibre.

Our broadband stats pages give breakdowns and the history of roll-outs in the different regions and councils across the UK dating back to 2010, where an area has been in existence that long.

A shortened summary for the different regions of the UK with key selected dates and the regions ordered by descending size in terms of premises is below. 1st January 2018 is a good baseline for when full fibre and Gigabit services were hardly available. 1st January 2022 reflects a growth in full fibre as roll-outs take off and a big jump in the Gigabit figures after the Virgin Media DOCSIS 3.0 to DOCSIS 3.1 updates. 6th July 2024 is the first set of data after the switch from a Conservative to a Labour Government and the increase to the final column shows that while roll-outs may be slowing, there is still plenty of activity. We have given both full-fibre and Gigabit availability figures as the full-fibre roll-outs are going to be the only way the figures will increase going forward.

As with all the other broadband milestones, there is wide variation across the UK. We expect Wales and Scotland to reach 85% Gigabit coverage around September 2025. Of course, if roll-outs slow down, it will be later, conversely, if R100 for Scotland ramps up it may be earlier and similar for Wales where Openreach holds a Project Gigabit contract. Of course, alt-nets will have an impact e.g. Ogi and Voneus in Wales and Highland Broadband and Go Fibre in Scotland.

So much for the past, what about the future? Well, the existing Project Gigabit contracts are generally delivering in volume now and these are delivering mainly to rural villages with the very rural properties popping during the later stages of roll-out in an area. Hopefully, we will hear soon from Government how they envisage the next five years for Gigabit and full fibre roll-outs progressing and what level of financial help or other incentives will be available. We hope that expertise and teams are not split up from any delays in further Project Gigabit projects, since at all stages from procurement, planning, installing in homes and running the live network, if there are periods of none of these happening, firms and people will move onto something else that pays the bills.

Broadband has in the past had good cross-party support as it is seen as boosting many parts of the economy and transforming what is possible in terms of remote health care. The debates are more about how much to spend to boost coverage and the issues around the use of poles to reduce roll-out costs, an increasingly hot topic. The issue around broadband poles becomes emotional very quickly and policing the small number of problems runs the risk of stifling roll-outs from responsible providers where it’s an overhead deployment or waiting a decade for a subsidised roll-out where costs are higher for underground and inflation costs for materials and labour will keep mounting.

The UK has an ambition to reach much higher Gigabit coverage levels of 98 to 99% for 2030, and while existing contracts will push us closer, the commercial full fibre roll-outs are increasingly overlapping each other. The density of urban areas and lower roll-out costs often prove more attractive than higher-cost less dense areas. To reach 99% Gigabit coverage, the issues around wayleaves and deployment in complex urban areas will need to be resolved and in older urban areas may prove to be unpopular due to the potential for disruption.