The Gigabit Broadband Rollout Shows How Government Wastes Our Money

In 2019, a simple political promise was made: ‘Gigabit broadband for every home.’ It sounded like progress. It sounded modern. But as monthly internet bills creep toward £40 or £50, it’s time to ask: are we paying for a service we actually need, or are we funding a massive private equity ‘rent-trap’?

To modernise the UK’s phones, we had to move from old copper wires to digital fibre. The old system was rotting; the change was necessary. But there were two ways to do it:

The engineered way: run fibre cables to the green cabinets at the end of your street, then use existing wires for the last few yards into your house. This is fast enough for 4K TV, Zoom and gaming for 95% of users.

Cost: Roughly £100 per household.

The ‘gold-plated’ way: dig up every single driveway and garden in the UK to run a brand-new glass cable directly into every living room.

Cost: Roughly £1,700 per household.

By choosing the second option, the government turned a manageable £3 billion upgrade into a staggering £50 billion-plus mega-project.

What else could £54 billion buy?

We are currently living through a national debate about where our money goes. Recent reports have highlighted that the UK’s annual benefits bill increase is approximately £18 billion – a figure often used to show how much we could have spent on 15 advanced Royal Navy frigates or 220 fighter jets.

If £18 billion is considered a transformative sum for national defence, consider the £54 billion (combining public subsidies and private equity debt) being sunk into the Gigabit rollout. For the price of ‘full fibre’ to every remote cottage, we could have funded the entire Royal Navy’s modernisation three times over. Instead, that capital is being buried in trenches to provide speeds that most households find totally unnecessary.

To make this expensive system ‘pay’, the industry is using a pincer movement on your wallet.

Price hikes: by doubling or trebling the cost of ‘basic’ phone lines, providers are effectively forcing people to switch to expensive fibre packages.

Withdrawing choice: the ‘middle-ground’ options – the cheaper services that were ‘fast enough’ – are being quietly withdrawn from the market. Like it or not, you’re getting the ‘Rolls Royce’ connection, and you’re being forced to pay the ‘Rolls Royce’ price.

Why the push for the most expensive version possible? Follow the money.

On the old system, suppliers made a modest £4 profit per month from your bill. On the new full fibre system, because the glass cables cost almost nothing to maintain once in the ground, that profit margin jumps to nearly £20 per month.

Because this project is funded by billions of pounds of private equity from firms like Goldman Sachs and Oaktree, its funders require a high return on their investment. Your rising monthly bill is essentially the ‘interest’ you are paying on a national debt you never voted for.

Like HS2, the Gigabit rollout is a case of ‘grand design’ over common sense. We have allowed lobbying power to exploit technical ignorance, turning a necessary £3 billion update into a £54 billion vanity project.

The UK will indeed have world-class internet speeds, but the ordinary citizen – who just wants to check his or her email and watch Netflix – is being forced to foot a bill that could have built a small army or protected the nation’s borders. We are building a high-speed internet railway into every living room, whether the inhabitants want to travel by train or not.