Summary

  • BDUK says expanded commercial rollout led it and CityFibre to redesign Hampshire’s Project Gigabit contract in May 2026, from about 75,500 premises and £104.2 million to about 29,000 premises and £71.7 million.
  • The October management snapshot records 29,420 contracted premises and 7,690 built; the September snapshot recorded 5,720 built and flagged a missing older supplier submission.

A fibre contract can lose two-thirds of its doors without losing its purpose. Hampshire’s Project Gigabit deal began in 2023 with public funding for roughly 75,500 premises and £104.2 million. BDUK says a significant expansion of commercial rollout changed the map. In May 2026 it and CityFibre revised the grant-backed scope to about 29,000 premises and £71.7 million. Subsidy should follow the places the market leaves behind. The governing question is whether every address removed from the public promise has a credible next route.

BDUK’s Hampshire page says the redesign reduces overlap with other suppliers’ commercial build. It also says talks continue with suppliers about remaining premises outside any rollout plan. Those are two different groups: addresses taken off the grant map because private plans moved in, and addresses still awaiting a route. The public contract page gives the before-and-after headline numbers, but no address-level reconciliation that lets a resident see which group their home entered.

The monthly tables add an operating snapshot, with a wrinkle. On 17 September, BDUK held figures of 29,420 contracted premises and 5,720 built under the Hampshire contract. A footnote attributed a decrease in delivered premises to a missing supplier submission from December 2024. The 17 October snapshot kept the contracted count at 29,420 and raised built contracted premises to 7,690: 1,970 more in the published table. BDUK’s own notes say the figures are rounded, arrive with variable ingestion lag and cannot be used to judge contract milestones. The table does not divide that 1,970 between newly completed work and repaired reporting.

That detail matters more than a cheerful progress arrow. A resident needs to know whether their address sits in CityFibre’s revised subsidised area, in a commercial plan, or in the group BDUK is still discussing with other suppliers. The contract page now points to an address checker and the premises-in-plan publication. Those tools can help a household inspect its current label. They do not, by themselves, show the full route from the 2023 contract to the 2026 redesign.

The next useful public document would be a dated address-level bridge: original contract, reason for leaving it, replacement plan and responsible builder. That would tell Hampshire which doors changed hands and which still need someone to knock.

Sources