The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has made a change today that re-opens their Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS) for parts of Devon in England, which means that local homes and businesses in poorly served rural areas can apply for big grants to help get a much faster broadband ISP network installed.
Just to recap. The GBVS usually offers grants worth up to £4,500 to help rural premises get a gigabit-capable broadband (1Gbps) ISP service installed, which is available to areas with speeds of “less than 100Mbps” – assuming there are also no near-term plans for a gigabit deployment in the same area (either via private investment or state-aid).
However, the GBVS has been operating with a very low level of UK availability for the past 1-2 years (i.e. it’s not currently available to most counties), which is largely to ensure that it avoids conflicting (i.e. duplicating / wasting public investment) with Project Gigabit’s larger Gigabit Infrastructure Subsidy (GIS) programme (i.e. the big build contracts that have been awarded to operators like Fibrus, Openreach, Wessex Internet and many others).
The good news today is that BDUK have updated their GBVS availability page to re-add Devon (South West England) back into the table, which is currently supported by several region-specific voucher suppliers – Openreach, Technological Services, Evolve and Bush Broadband.
The move is useful as it comes after Airband scaled-back their state-aid supported FTTP broadband deployment contract under the Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) programme in 2024 (here), which also followed the termination of Truespeed’s similar deal in 2022 (here). Suffice to say that some locations negatively affected by those terminations may be able to benefit from vouchers.
The GBVS is currently also available to poorly served parts of Derbyshire, the Isle of Wight, Newcastle and North Tyneside, Greater London, Merseyside and Great Manchester, Birmingham and the Black Country.