- The UK’s £5bn Project Gigabit initiative is gathering pace
- It is providing network capital expenditure funding for fibre rollouts to rural and hard-to-reach areas and will enable 85% national coverage with gigabit broadband by 2025
- Contracts worth some £1.1bn have been allocated so far, with the latest tranche worth about £450m
- The ultimate goal is to have 99% of Brits covered by 2030
The UK government has awarded six new contracts worth about £450m as part of its Project Gigabit initiative that aims to ensure that rural and other hard-to-reach areas are covered by fibre access networks, with wholesale altnet CityFibre picking up the vast majority of the new deals.
The new contracts will, according to the UK government, ensure that some 236,000 rural homes and businesses are within reach of fibre access network lines capable of delivering gigabit broadband services. Of the six new contracts, five have been awarded to CityFibre, the alternative wholesale network operator, which boasted recently that it has reached some financial milestones, and the sixth to Connexin, which is based in the splendid city of Kingston-upon-Hull in Yorkshire.
