Waiting for Project Gigabit: what businesses can do while the rollout catches up

Written by the Brdy editorial team. Reviewed by Mike Bamford. Published 22 September 2026. 7 minute read.

The short answer. BDUK’s August 2026 data shows roughly 35% of contracted Project Gigabit premises are built, and the Government’s 99% target runs to 2032. Businesses in the remaining areas do not have to wait. Satellite, 4G and 5G fixed wireless can serve as primary connectivity now, or as an independent failover path that stays useful after fibre arrives.

Project Gigabit is building gigabit broadband into the parts of the UK that commercial operators would not reach on their own. It is working. It is also not finished. BDUK’s August 2026 figures record 846,770 premises inside the initial scope of Project Gigabit contracts, and 296,770 of them built. For the businesses sitting in the other 550,000, the question is not when fibre arrives. It is what happens to the business in the meantime, because a future fibre connection is not a connectivity strategy.

Which communities are at the back of the queue?

There isn’t a reliable national list of parishes ranked according to when they will receive Project Gigabit connectivity.

Project Gigabit is being delivered through multiple regional and cross-regional contracts, and Building Digital UK (BDUK) publishes progress primarily at contract level rather than as a definitive parish-by-parish completion timetable. Contract scope can also change.

So it would be misleading to label a particular village or parish as the “last” place Project Gigabit will reach. What we can identify is where substantial delivery remains.

There are important qualifications to the BDUK numbers. The figures are rounded to the nearest 10, can be affected by reporting delays and supplier data resubmissions, and should not be used to judge whether individual suppliers are meeting contractual milestones. They are a snapshot, not a performance league table. But they do illustrate the scale and unevenness of the rollout.

Which Project Gigabit contracts have the most left to build?

The August data gives a clearer picture of where some of that work remains.

• The Cheshire contract has 18,460 premises in its initial contracted scope and, as of the August snapshot, zero recorded as built.
• Worcestershire has 22,980 contracted premises and 1,000 recorded as built.
• The much larger contract covering North Herefordshire, North Wales, Shropshire and South West Wales has 65,120 contracted premises, with 2,570 recorded as built.
• The contract covering the rest of Scotland has 77,640 premises in its initial scope and 6,500 recorded as built.
• The Essex and North East England contract has 35,300 contracted premises and 3,740 recorded as built.

Those figures shouldn’t be interpreted as promised completion dates or evidence that delivery is behind schedule. BDUK explicitly cautions against doing that. What they show is something simpler. For tens of thousands of premises in some of Britain’s harder-to-reach areas, there is still substantial infrastructure to build.

The Government’s wider ambition reflects the scale of that challenge. It expects 99% of UK premises to have access to gigabit-capable connectivity by 2032. For businesses currently operating without dependable high-speed connectivity, 2032 is a long-term infrastructure objective. It isn’t an operational answer.

What does waiting for Project Gigabit actually cost a business?

For a residential property, waiting for better broadband can mean frustration. For a business, the calculation is different.

Consider a rural construction yard or farm business operating on an ageing connection while its area moves through the Project Gigabit rollout. That connection might be supporting:

• cloud-based ERP and inventory systems
• VoIP telephony
• card payments
• CCTV and security
• remote monitoring and asset tracking
• communications between sites
• supplier and customer systems.

The business doesn’t stop becoming dependent on those systems because better infrastructure is planned. Quite the opposite. Digital dependency continues increasing while the connectivity beneath it remains unchanged.

That creates an uncomfortable mismatch. A business can have a credible long-term connectivity plan while remaining operationally exposed today.

Is waiting for fibre a resilience strategy?

This is the assumption worth challenging. Waiting can be perfectly reasonable if the existing connection is adequate, stable and the consequences of failure are limited. But those conditions need to be tested rather than assumed.

The question these businesses need to be asking is: “What happens if our existing connection fails before then?”

If losing connectivity for four hours would stop production, prevent payments, take cloud systems offline or leave a site unable to operate normally, the risk exists today regardless of the future rollout. And even then, fibre availability and connectivity resilience are not necessarily the same thing.

What happens to premises that are too expensive to reach with fibre?

There is another important point that can get lost in the discussion around fibre rollout. Not every hard-to-reach premises will necessarily be best served in the same way.

The Government has recognised a category of very hard-to-reach premises where conventional gigabit deployment can become disproportionately expensive. For these locations, alternative technologies such as fixed wireless and satellite connectivity form part of the wider discussion around how coverage can be extended.

That shouldn’t automatically be viewed as a second-class outcome. The objective for a business isn’t fibre for the sake of fibre. It’s dependable connectivity that supports operations.

What are the alternatives to waiting for Project Gigabit?

For years, alternative connectivity has often been treated as a compromise. That view is increasingly outdated.

Depending on the site, businesses waiting for fixed infrastructure can consider technologies including 4G, 5G fixed wireless and modern satellite connectivity. These can be used as primary connectivity, interim infrastructure or as a separate resilience layer alongside an existing fixed connection.

Brdy supplies Starlink and OneWeb connectivity to UK businesses in exactly these locations, and the useful version of this conversation starts with the site survey, not the speed test.

The important point isn’t to assume one technology is universally better. It is to design around the operational requirement. A business should be asking:

• How quickly can the service be deployed?
• What performance does this particular site require?
• How stable is coverage at this location?
• What happens if the primary connection fails?
• Is failover automatic?
• Are the primary and backup connections genuinely independent?
• Which systems must remain operational during an outage?
• What does downtime cost compared with the cost of maintaining resilience?

That is a more useful conversation than simply comparing headline download speeds. It moves the discussion from broadband to infrastructure.

Can I still get a gigabit broadband voucher?

The funding landscape has changed too. The Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme formed another part of Project Gigabit, using grants worth up to £4,500 for eligible homes and businesses within local projects to contribute towards the cost of installing gigabit-capable connectivity.

But the scheme closed to new voucher project submissions on 31 August 2026. Existing voucher projects can continue, with vouchers needing to be issued by 31 March 2027 and delivery running until the scheme’s planned closure on 31 March 2028, or the individual project’s agreed end date if earlier.

For communities that hadn’t entered a voucher project before the deadline, that particular route is no longer open to new submissions. It makes understanding the actual position of an individual premises more important. Being located within a wider Project Gigabit contract area doesn’t tell a business precisely when its connection will become available. For an organisation planning an expansion, cloud migration, new production line or site opening, that uncertainty matters.

Why is the final percentage an infrastructure problem of its own?

National infrastructure programmes naturally focus on the percentage of the country reached. At policy level, that makes sense. It makes less sense when you’re part of the percentage still waiting.

The remaining premises tend to be difficult precisely because their economics and engineering are different. They can be remote. Dispersed. Expensive to reach. Or located somewhere that doesn’t fit neatly into the standard telecoms deployment model.

Businesses in those locations shouldn’t assume that their only two options are accepting inadequate connectivity or waiting for conventional infrastructure to arrive. There is a third option. Treat the waiting period as an infrastructure problem in its own right.

Don’t confuse the long-term plan with today’s risk

Project Gigabit is important infrastructure investment. The issue isn’t whether gigabit-capable networks should be extended into hard-to-reach communities. They should. The issue is what businesses do between now and the point at which suitable connectivity becomes available to their premises.

For an organisation with little dependency on connectivity, waiting may be acceptable. For a cloud-dependent operation where an outage affects revenue, production, security, communications or customer service, waiting carries a cost and a risk. That risk should be understood. Because “Project Gigabit is coming to our area” and “Our connectivity risk is controlled” are not the same statement.

The stronger approach is to separate the two decisions. Keep the long-term infrastructure plan. Then examine what the business needs today. For some sites, that may mean continuing with the existing connection. For others, it may mean deploying wireless or satellite connectivity while fixed infrastructure is being built. And where downtime is unacceptable, it may mean creating an independent failover path that remains useful even after fibre eventually arrives.

That changes the investment from a temporary workaround into part of a longer-term resilience strategy. Project Gigabit is addressing Britain’s long-term connectivity gap. Businesses still have to manage the operational gap in the meantime. For those operating in the communities where substantial delivery remains, that is the infrastructure decision that deserves attention now.

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