Policy paper

Project Gigabit Phase One Delivery Plan

A response to our recent consultation across the telecoms industry and local government outlining our plan for the £5 billion gigabit broadband rollout.

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Project Gigabit

The government wants to deliver nationwide coverage of gigabit-capable broadband as soon as possible and is confident that the private sector will deliver gigabit connectivity to the most commercial 80% of the country by 2025. We are backing Project Gigabit with £5 billion so hard to reach communities are not left out of this revolution in connectivity.

To support this, the government will continue to implement an ambitious programme of work to remove barriers to broadband deployment.

We also want to encourage commercial investment and stimulate suppliers to go further into harder to reach areas, by using subsidies to stretch that commercial activity further.

We are targeting a minimum of 85% gigabit-capable coverage by 2025 but will seek to accelerate rollout further to get as close to 100% as possible.

In December 2020, we published Planning for Gigabit Delivery in 2021 asking for input from local and devolved government and telecoms providers to help us shape how best to use public subsidy to deliver these objectives.

Following constructive and positive feedback to the paper from 96 organisations across the telecoms industry and local government the Project Gigabit Delivery Plan builds on the December 2020 proposals and the responses we have received and sets out our immediate delivery plans.

Published 19 March 2021
Last updated 21 April 2021 + show all updates
  1. Updated wording to make clear map in section 'Superfast Broadband Programme' (page 30) shows areas in yellow where contracts were signed between Sept and Dec 2020.

  2. First published.