The £6m contract was awarded today to boost the rollout to more than 7,000 hard-to-reach properties in Dorset by 2025.
The first home will be connected by the end of the year, with an expected completion date for all by 2025. The project will cover the rural outskirts of towns, villages and hamlets across the region from Sherborne to Verwood and Shaftesbury to Blandford Forum.
The Project Gigabit fund is used to meet pledges originally announced in the 2019 Conservative manifesto to install full-fibre, gigabit-capable broadband in every home and business across the UK by 2025.
This pledge was later downgraded to just 85 per cent of premises in the UK, although MPs have questioned whether even this target is plausible considering the speed of the rollout.
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) said that coverage has increased from seven per cent in 2019 to 70 per cent of UK homes and businesses in 2022. In the last five months, around...