August 2026 update for Project Gigabit released

The monthly update from BDUK on the Project Gigabit contracts across England and Wales has been released, and the Fibrus contract in Northern Ireland has been added to the dataset.

Project Gigabit contracts excluding the ones in Scotland is set to deliver Gigabit capable broadband (usually full fibre) to 846,770 premises once completed and to date is reported as delivering to 296,770 premises. This means once complete the contracts will have increased Gigabit coverage by around 2.5 points across England, Wales and Northern Ireland and currently are responsible for around 0.8 to 0.9 points of current Gigabit coverage figure in the UK of 91.1%.

The problems of tracking rollouts and releasing monthly figures is something we are all too familiar with, and the BDUK team has added a number of caveats to the August release with supplier data resubmissions means some areas have seen the figures drop. With pretty much every network we track we have seen places that they’ve tried to claim as Ready for Service and are not, or only appear so after a further few weeks, or in some cases actually vanish to then re-appear after further work. Reasons can be varied, from a failure of a fibre splice through to people objecting to overhead fibre crossing their garden even when at the recommended safe height.

The footnotes for areas where the progress has gone backwards are:

4,220 premises removed from Lancashire, West Berkshire, Staffordshire, Surrey, Hertfordshire, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire. To be re-added at a later date 

1,160 premises removed from Devon, Mid Wales and South East Wales. To be re-added at a later date 

10 premises removed from Worcestershire. To be re-added at a later date 

40 premises removed from Hampshire. To be re-added at a later date 

20 premises removed from North East Staffordshire. To be re-added at a later date 

930 premises removed from North Oxfordshire. To be re-added at a later date 

360 premises removed from South Oxfordshire. To be re-added at a later date

The note about being re-added might be very like the ongoing work we see with the Openreach rollouts when RFS premises vanish to then appear weeks or months later. Importantly Project Gigabit contract holders only get paid out after the BDUK has audited the rollout rather than based on the monthly submissions they make to BDUK.