The government has announced the first stages of its plans to get ultra-fast broadband to the remotest of homes in the UK.
Originally it had promised to roll out gigabit-speed broadband to every home in Britain by 2025 but that was reduced to 85% coverage in November.
The budget remains at £5bn – but only £1.2bn of that will be made available up to 2024.
The infrastructure build should start in 2022, the government said.
The first to benefit will be homes and businesses in Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Dorset, Durham, Essex, Northumberland, South Tyneside and Tees Valley.
The next areas are expected to be Norfolk, Shropshire, Suffolk, Worcestershire, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.
It is expected that commercial deployments of gigabit-capable fibre networks will reach more than 70% of premises by the end of 2025, without government intervention.
The government has said that reaching the final 1% of homes in very remote areas could be prohibitively expensive.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson described Project Gigabit as “the rocket boost that we need to get lightning-fast broadband to all areas of the country”.
The trade organisation techUK has also welcomed the news.
And speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Oliver Dowden said: “We’ve already made tremendous progress with Project Gigabit – our national mission to get everyone in the country the fastest broadband on the planet.
“The challenge is the last 20%, which can’t be delivered commercially – and that’s what our plans being outlined today are all about.”
He reiterated the watered-down plans to reach “at least 85% of the country by 2025”.
“I think we will be able to go faster than that still – and the prime minister and I are meeting with telecoms companies again.
“Basically, we have the money to provide that subsidy, it’s about the capacity in the telecoms market to deliver it, because remember these are very remote areas.
The major broadband networks have been pressing the government to make clear how it planned to allocate the public money it’s set aside for Project Gigabit, so they’ll be relieved to get some detail.
But it’s still clear that the plan to put rural Britain in the broadband fast lane is behind schedule.
At the 2019 election, the manifesto promise was to give every home and business a Gigabit connection by the end of 2025. Last November that target was cut to 85% of premises, with just £1.2bn available in the short term.
Now that money is beginning to flow, but with Openreach’s chief executive emphasising the need for speedy decisions, it seems there’s not complete confidence that even the more limited target will be hit.
