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The Norfolk County Council (NCC) in England has published a new document, which reveals the future plan for gigabit broadband deployments after CityFibre scaled-back their contracted roll-out of full fibre infrastructure under the UK government’s Project Gigabit scheme in May 2026. As expected, Openreach (BT) look set to pick up the slack.
In case anybody has forgotten, CityFibre announced in the spring that their Project Gigabit contracts had all been “re-scoped in response to the accelerated rollout of commercially funded full fibre across Project Gigabit areas“ (here). In practice this meant that the operator’s original £114.2m contract for Norfolk, which aimed to cover 62,200 hard-to-reach premises, was reduced to £61.9m and would only cover around 33,000 premises.
However, CityFibre’s excuse later turned out to be only partly true, as the operator’s change had also left plenty of premises in poorly served areas with no alternative plans for future gigabit connectivity (here). At the time we speculated that the Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) directorate would attempt to tackle this by moving such premises into one of Openreach’s larger Type C (Cross-Regional) contracts under Project Gigabit. No other suppliers tackle Type C and this is precisely the sort of situation that such contracts exist to help tackle (examples here, here, here and here).