Nearly six hundred thousand rural homes and businesses under contract to receive publicly funded gigabit broadband still have not been connected — and with some of the program's largest and most complex projects sitting at single-digit completion, the UK's most ambitious broadband investment faces a long road before its 2032 targets come into view.

Building Digital UK (BDUK) published its monthly progress update for Project Gigabit on Tuesday, revealing that 287,510 premises have now been connected under Gigabit Infrastructure Subsidy (GIS) contracts — a net gain of 16,050 from the 271,460 reported in June. That brings the program to 34% of its 838,490 contracted premises, leaving approximately 551,000 still to be built — the majority in rural communities that commercial operators have bypassed as uneconomical.

Why This Is Harder Than It Looks

The comparison with national gigabit coverage — which now stands at roughly 91% of UK premises — can make Project Gigabit's 34% contract delivery look like a program falling badly behind. The reality is more specific, and more instructive.

Project Gigabit does not operate in the 91%. It operates in the other 9%: isolated villages, remote farmsteads, island communities, and rural valleys where laying fiber is not commercially viable. The per-premises cost of fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) — the technology Project Gigabit prefers — rises sharply in low-density areas because the fixed costs of civil engineering (trenching, ducting, pole erection, road closures) must be spread across far fewer subscribers. In urban areas, FTTP can cost around £1,000 per home. In rural locations, that figure can reach £9,000 to £15,000 or higher — a multiple that fundamentally changes what it takes for an operator to build profitably, even with a public subsidy.

FTTP networks work by running optical fiber — glass cables that carry data as pulses of light at roughly two-thirds the speed of light — all the way from an exchange or local point of presence to the individual property, where an Optical Network Unit (ONT) converts the light signal to an electrical one for the home's router. There is no copper "last mile" as there is in older FTTC (Fiber to the Cabinet) broadband. The result is symmetrical speeds of 1Gbps or more, low latency, and immunity to the distance degradation that plagued rural ADSL connections. Getting fiber to the last few hundred meters of a dispersed rural community is often where the bulk of the cost lies.

The sequential nature of delivery — planning, wayleave acquisition (permission from landowners to cross their land or erect poles), civil engineering, cable installation, and then the final customer connection — also means that large contracts appear to stall before they accelerate. Early build phases generate almost no "built-to" count in BDUK's monthly data. A contract at 4% completion is not necessarily failing; it may simply be in its planning phase. BDUK notes that monthly build rates "can vary considerably as different phases commence and complete," making any single month's snapshot a poor guide to longer-term trajectory.

Openreach Holds Most of the Unbuilt Territory

Of the 37 active contracts tracked in the July update, the performance spread is wide. Several have already reached completion: Wessex Internet's Central Cornwall and South West Cornwall builds, GoFibre's County Durham and North Northumberland rollouts, and Freedom Fiber's North Shropshire contract all report 100% completion.

At the other end, Openreach's portfolio of large rural CO (Call Off) contracts presents a very different picture. The CO3 contract covering North Herefordshire, North Wales, Shropshire, and South West Wales stands at 4% complete (2,570 of 65,120 premises). Worcestershire's CO7 and Essex and the North East's CO5 contracts are each in the 4–6% range. Openreach's newly added CO8 Cheshire contract — absorbed from Freedom Fiber, which terminated its Cheshire contract in March 2025 — has not yet recorded a single completed build.

The largest single contract in the program — Openreach's CO6 covering the Rest of Scotland at 77,640 contracted premises — sat at 7% complete as of the most recent reported data, with approximately 5,680 premises built.

These numbers require context. Openreach did not win these contracts in open competition as the preferred supplier; it inherited several of them after smaller alternative network operators (altnets) failed to deliver. Freedom Fiber, FullFibre Limited, Voneus, and Wildanet all exited Project Gigabit contracts between late 2024 and early 2026, citing delivery costs higher than anticipated. FullFibre Limited's exit from the Peak District and West Herefordshire contracts in May 2025, and Wildanet's withdrawal from its Cornwall contracts, are the most recent examples. Openreach's position as fallback contractor of last resort means its total contracted premises count has grown substantially — but the new CO contracts were awarded relatively recently, and their build phases are only just beginning.

Why Altnets Keep Walking Away

The structural economics of rural FTTP explain the pattern of altnet withdrawals. Alternative network operators — smaller, independent fiber builders without Openreach's scale and balance sheet — face a cost structure in rural areas that their business models can absorb only up to a point. Wildanet's statement on exiting its Cornwall contracts named delivery costs that rose "significantly beyond anticipated" as the direct cause.

The problem has a regulatory dimension too. Fibrus, the altnet building in Cumbria and Northern Ireland under Project Gigabit contracts, has argued publicly that the prices it must pay Openreach to access ducts and telegraph poles in rural areas — under Ofcom's Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) regime — make it disproportionately expensive to build where the ground is already sparsely populated.

Ofcom's Telecoms Access Review 2026, published in March, rejected the altnet argument. It maintained the existing pricing framework, concluding that the approach balanced investment incentives with competition. Fibrus Chair Conal Henry called the decision "a disaster for rural Britain," arguing that it "kills the chance of any further investment" from alternative operators and, by extension, removes the competitive pressure that might otherwise have stimulated Openreach investment. Fibrus Group MD and CFO Colin Hutchinson told ISPreview in May that the review "entrenches Openreach's dominance" and "all but kills the prospect of future private investment in many rural areas."

The practical result visible in July's data: smaller operators are exiting, Openreach is absorbing their contracts at varying speeds, and the per-month build rate — while positive — has remained in the 15,000–16,000 range, a pace that leaves 551,000 premises requiring at least three more years to build, assuming no acceleration and no further supplier changes.

Where Progress Is Real

Not all the July data signals a program under strain. CityFibre's Cambridgeshire rollout added 1,190 premises in July, reaching 66% complete. Fibrus's Cumbria contract — the second-largest in the program at 53,540 contracted premises — stands at 65%, with a cumulative 34,750 premises connected. Quickline's Northern North Yorkshire and Lincolnshire and East Riding contracts are in the 34%–46% range and added 900 and 1,230 premises respectively in July.

Wiltshire Council's recent praise of Wessex Internet's South Wiltshire build — which has exceeded 40% of its 18,700-premise target — offers a model of what Project Gigabit can look like when the economics and the delivery chain align. Community fiber volunteer-built networks like B4RN in Lancashire and Cumbria have demonstrated per-premises costs as low as £1,000–£1,500 using community labor — far below the industry standard — showing that dense pre-signup and volunteer civil engineering can change the math entirely.

What Does 'Connected' Actually Mean?

One critical figure is absent from every monthly BDUK update: take-up. The monthly data tracks "built to" premises — properties past which a gigabit-capable network has been laid and to which a connection can be offered. It does not track whether anyone in those properties is actually subscribing.

The distinction matters more than it might appear. A rural premise counted in the 287,510 may have gigabit infrastructure running past its garden wall. If the residents are not aware of it, cannot afford a subscription, or have opted to stay on mobile broadband or satellite, the public benefit — the thing that justifies the £5 billion price tag — has not actually been delivered. The clawback mechanisms that allow the government to recoup a share of its subsidy when operators achieve commercial success also depend on take-up: low subscription rates reduce the revenue that triggers those returns.

Ofcom's Connected Nations reports measure gigabit "availability" (coverage) rather than take-up. BDUK's annual statistics include some take-up context, but the monthly contract-level data — the most granular and most timely measure of Project Gigabit's progress — contains no subscription information at all. BDUK has not yet published take-up data in its monthly format, despite the question being directly relevant to assessing whether the infrastructure investment is achieving its purpose.

This is not a minor gap in the data. Knowing that 287,510 premises have been "built to" tells us the civil engineering is happening. Knowing how many of them are subscribing would tell us whether it is working.

The Road to 2030 and 2032

Project Gigabit aims for near-universal gigabit coverage — approximately 99% of UK premises — by 2032, with most of the program's £5 billion budget committed through to a 2030 spending deadline. The national commercial rollout, already at 91% of premises, means the program's contracted areas represent the portion where commercial operators have calculated the numbers do not add up without subsidy.

At the current monthly run rate of approximately 15,000–16,000 premises per month, the remaining 551,000 contracted premises would take roughly three years to complete — landing around mid-2029, just before the spending deadline and three years before the coverage target. That assumes no further contractor withdrawals, no significant scope reductions, and continued momentum from Openreach's large CO contracts as they move through their early planning phases and into active build.

Whether that assumption holds will depend partly on the economics of rural fiber — which have already proved wrong for several altnet operators — and partly on whether the regulatory environment created by Ofcom's 2026 market review encourages or discourages the private investment that complements public subsidy. The direction, based on the evidence of the past year, is not straightforwardly encouraging.

What is certain is that Project Gigabit represents the most substantial public investment in UK broadband infrastructure in a generation. Whether its ultimate measure is premises built, subscriptions activated, or rural communities genuinely transformed — the data needed to answer that question more fully is not yet being published.

Frequently Asked Questions

When will Project Gigabit reach my area?

Whether a specific address is in a Project Gigabit contract area can be checked using BDUK's address checker for England and Wales, with separate checkers for Scotland and Northern Ireland. If your address is already in a contracted area, the timeline depends on which contract it falls under and where that contract is in its delivery phases. Contracts currently at 4–7% completion — including several large Openreach lots in Scotland, Wales, and England — may not reach individual properties for several years. Contracts already past 50–65% completion are likely to finish within the next two to three years.

Why is rural broadband so much slower and harder to build than in cities?

The core reason is cost per premises. In urban areas, a fiber operator can spread the cost of laying a cable across many closely spaced homes — reducing the per-connection cost to roughly £1,000. In rural areas, the same cable must run for much longer distances across fields, under roads, and up telegraph poles before reaching a fraction as many homes. The civil engineering cost — trenching, ducting, wayleave agreements with landowners — does not shrink in proportion to the number of subscribers, so each rural connection can cost £9,000 to £15,000 or more. That gap is why commercial operators build in cities first and why public subsidy is the mechanism designed to bridge it.

Does "connected" mean people in those 287,510 premises are actually using the gigabit service?

Not necessarily. BDUK's monthly figures count premises that have been "built to" — meaning a gigabit-capable network has physically reached them. Whether residents in those properties are subscribing to a service is a separate question, and one that BDUK does not currently answer in its monthly reporting. The distinction matters: a rural home passed by fiber infrastructure but not subscribed to a service represents completed civil engineering, not necessarily a completed public benefit. BDUK's annual reports include some take-up data, but granular subscription figures at the contract level are not publicly published.

What happens when a Project Gigabit contractor pulls out of a contract?

When an altnet exits a contract — as Freedom Fiber, FullFibre Limited, Wildanet, and Voneus have all done between 2024 and 2026 — the premises it was supposed to reach go into limbo. BDUK then must either rescope the contract, run a new procurement, or reassign the area to another operator. In practice, Openreach has absorbed several of these failed contracts as extensions to its existing CO (Call Off) commitments. This ensures continuity of delivery in principle, but it adds time: Openreach must conduct its own planning, wayleave, and engineering before build begins, which is why contracts inherited by Openreach show low or zero completion in the months following takeover.