CityFibre contracts for Project Gigabit rescoped due to increased commercial rollouts

Lots of changes to the contracts CityFibre has been awarded as part of Project Gigabit, the end result being that CityFibre is now aiming to deliver full fibre to 226,000 premises via subsidy. This includes the 70,000 subsidised premises already delivered.

The totals CityFibre has built in the Project Gigabit contract areas is larger than the number receiving subsidy and the lack of subsidy is either an address was already in the CityFibre commercial rollout plans, or another provider who declared it in the BDUK Open Market Reviews. This means CityFibre is saying it has delivered to 150,000 rural and harder-to-reach premises, i.e. 80,000 commercially plus the 70,000 subsidised. The adjusted contracts and commercial rollout in the contract areas are looking at a total of 450,000 premises by 2030.

The contract areas affected are:

• Cambridgeshire
• Norfolk
• Suffolk
• Hampshire
• Leicestershire and Warwickshire
• East and West Sussex
• Kent
• Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes
• East Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire

The contract CityFibre inherited with its purchase of Connexin is to be returned, therefore Nottinghamshire and West Lincolnshire will need a new contract and given the pattern elsewhere this will probably end up with Openreach.

“We are immensely proud of CityFibre’s involvement in Project Gigabit, an ambitious programme that has helped unlock the benefits of full fibre infrastructure for households and businesses previously at risk of being left behind. BDUK’s commitment has helped spur further investment and continued innovation and the time is right to focus on where we will have the biggest impact as we establish the competitive digital infrastructure market the UK deserves.”

Simon Holden, CityFibre’s Chief Executive Officer

“Over the past 18 months, this government has delivered upgrades to more than 229,000 hard-to-reach premises across the country. Our reforms to the telecoms market have unlocked a surge in commercial broadband rollout, meaning many areas previously in scope for CityFibre’s Project Gigabit contracts will now be upgraded without cost to taxpayers.

We welcome CityFibre’s progress to date and remain fully committed to supporting communities still struggling with slow broadband. That’s why we are already in discussions with other suppliers to ensure remaining premises receive upgrades as soon as possible, and these changes will not affect our target of reaching 99% gigabit coverage by 2032.”

Liz Lloyd, telecoms minister

The core reason for all the changes is that the commercial rollouts of other providers has delivered service to addresses that were part of the Project Gigabit contracts. The theory is that the Open Market Review should avoid this as providers are meant to declare their plans for the next three years, but providers plans can and do change and footprints may expand or contract. In theory the Open Market Review data gathering every four months should keep BDUK and its contract holders up to date, but data gathered in January 2026 is only just now filtering through to the decision making and we are still waiting on the Open Data to update our maps.

We will now head over to our Project Gigabit summary page and attempt to update all the relevant information.

For those old enough to remember the Superfast contracts in the 2012 to 2016 and beyond, adjustments like this were common but there are was a much more varied level of information released, invariably no information until a lot later in a contracts life span. So while contract changes are annoying while we don’t have perfect live data on everything things are a lot better than they used to be.

We had been mapping some of the CityFibre rollouts and often wondered about the subsidy situation as it is not uncommon to see small villages go from no full fibre to CityFibre arriving shortly followed by Openreach or someone like nexfibre.

Update 12:30pm We’ve added up the figures and the contract summary summary for CityFibre drops from 461,200 premises to 227,000 premises and the value of all the contract changes from £779.7m to £500.7m. The increase in subsidy for each premise may be a reflection of increased costs of labour and materials as much as the remaining premises are more complex to reach in terms of distance and lack of ducting/poles currently.