Transparency data

BDUK annual performance report 2024: bulletin

Published 13 December 2024

1. About this release

This annual performance report provides breakdowns of how many premises in the United Kingdom have received gigabit-capable broadband coverage as a result of Building Digital UK (BDUK) subsidy.

Please contact us at [email protected] with any questions or suggestions for improvements. 

2. Headline findings

We estimate that BDUK interventions delivered 143,900 premises with gigabit-capable coverage between 1 April 2023 and 31 March 2024. An estimated 1,064,500 total premises have been given gigabit-capable coverage by BDUK’s gigabit programmes.

Of the premises covered by BDUK between 1 April 2023 and 31 March 2024:

• 92% (132,700) were rural, compared to 23% of all premises in BDUK’s premises base in the UK being classed as rural
• 43% (62,400) previously received speeds below 30 Mbps
• 8% (11,100) were delivered under our new Gigabit contracts (Government Infrastructure Subsidy scheme)

A premises is counted as provided with gigabit-capable coverage (or ‘passed’) when it is possible to access a gigabit-capable service for the supplier’s standard price and be connected in the supplier’s standard timescale. We count both directly subsidised premises as well as uncommercial premises that were not directly funded but received connections as a result of nearby BDUK-funded projects; as a result, all premises passed figures are estimates based on a combination of raw supplier data and modelled estimates. We covered 17,300 fewer premises between 1 April 2023 and 31 March 2024 compared to the previous year due to the wind down of delivery under the Superfast Broadband Programme.

3. Publication information

3.1 Data sources

We used the following data sources for the 2024 annual performance report:

• BDUK management information as of 1 September 2024
• National Statistics UPRN Lookup (NSUL):  June 2024
• National Statistics Postcode Lookup (NSPL): June 2024
• Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) Settlement Development Limits 2015
• Scottish Government Urban Rural Classification 2020
• Ofcom Connected Nations: January 2024 data from 2024 Spring Update
• Ordnance Survey (OS) AddressBase Premium: Epoch 112

3.2 Changes from the February 2024 release

BDUK updates its historical time series with every release. This is because BDUK is working with suppliers to improve the quality of their reporting; when they do so, we sometimes receive information that changes the first delivery date of that premises. We have also made methodological improvements to how we count premises from Superfast contracts that were delivered as overspill (premises not paid for but delivered en-route to subsidised premises, which would not have otherwise been delivered); we now consistently count all non-commercial overspill where we have high quality data from suppliers. As we receive higher quality data from suppliers delivering under the vouchers intervention, we move premises within projects from the conservative multiplier methodology (where we apply a fixed multiplier to each connected voucher to estimate the total number of premises passed) to the data-driven counting methodology (where we count specific premises as reported by suppliers), which has caused an increase in premises passed by vouchers. We have also applied a postcode cap where we do not have Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs), ensuring that we do not count more premises in a postcode than are in our premises base. For more details regarding methodology, see our methodology update.

3.3 Known issues

BDUK is awaiting adequate quality data from some Superfast suppliers. As a result, we expect to revise the Superfast data for quarter 4 (January to March 2024) upwards (by approximately 500 premises) when we receive complete data.

For this report we have not been able to discount premises where a commercial supplier has built before our subsidised supplier for our GIS intervention. This is because we do not receive complete premises-level data from Ofcom. We are investigating methodologies and processes to do this for our first official statistics release in December 2024 or January 2025, which would likely result in a small downwards revision (approximately 100 premises).