Broadband for new builds: which network was actually built to your plot, why one company saying no is not your answer, and how to find out in writing

The short version, for somebody looking at a checker that says no

Direct answer: One network saying no is not the same as your plot having nothing. It is one company's answer about one network, and there are usually others.

Almost everything written about new-build broadband answers a question the buyer did not ask. It explains the building regulations, which are not in doubt, and then hands the reader a vague wait. What a buyer standing in a finished house with a dead checker actually wants to know is narrower than that, and it is answerable: what is in the ground at my plot, and who will tell me.

Start with the thing that causes most of the confusion. The rules promise a gigabit connection from some network. They do not promise a particular company, and they never mention one. So a particular operator telling you its fibre does not reach your property is entirely consistent with the rules being satisfied by somebody else, or with the developer having arranged nothing yet, or with your address simply not existing in the file the checkers read. Three different situations. One identical symptom.

Telling those three apart takes four questions, which is the tool below, and the answer decides who you should be talking to. For one of them the honest advice is to stop chasing broadband companies altogether this month, because nothing any of them can do will move it. For another, the fix is yours and it takes a week.

None of this means anybody has done anything wrong. A new estate is a building site with a postcode, and the paperwork behind it moves at a different speed from the bricks. Several organisations have to do things in a particular order and each of them is getting on with it. The only real failure here is that nothing tells the buyer where in that order their own plot currently sits, which is the gap this page is trying to close.

If what you want is the legal position rather than the practical one, that belongs on its own page and it is written: what the new-build broadband rules actually guarantee, nation by nation, with the instrument behind each. This page picks up where that one ends.

The three things a no can mean

Direct answer: A checker that says no at a brand new address means one of three unrelated things, and the fix is different in each case.

The first is your address, and it is the one most people never consider because it does not feel like it could possibly be the problem. Every provider's checker reads the same address file. Royal Mail publishes what happens with a brand new one: “If the property you're looking for is a new build (or for example a house recently converted into flats), the postcode might not have been added to our database yet.” Nothing is wrong with the building, the ducting or the network. Your home is simply not yet in the list the checkers read. “Our address and postcode information is held in the Postcode Address File (PAF). PAF is regulated in the UK by Ofcom.”

The second is the network build, which is real work and genuinely unfinished. Openreach is straightforward about this and about what it cannot tell you: “There's no fixed timescale. It could be a matter of weeks or longer depending on the engineering work required.” It names why one house goes before another: “Network build in phases - Even within the same street, some addresses are connected before others.” Why the systems lag behind the work: “Records still updating - Sometimes our systems show your neighbour as ready before your own address is updated.” And what the work itself can involve: “Engineering challenges - Specialist work may be needed to connect your home, such as digging ducts, replacing poles, or overcoming blocked routes.”

The third is the road, and it is the one almost nobody names. CityFibre is the only operator we found that publishes it at all: “Unfortunately, we are unable to install to new estates until the highways have been released to the council.” Until a road is adopted it belongs to the developer, so an operator wanting to dig in it is asking a private landowner rather than a highway authority. That is a different conversation and it can take a great deal longer. Its advice on who to ask is short and correct: “To understand who owns the road on your street, please contact your local council.”

The address cause has a page of its own, because the chasing is fiddly and worth setting out properly: new-build broadband delays, when your address cannot order yet. This page is about telling the three apart in the first place, and about the one question that settles it.

Work out which one it is, and write the email that gets the answer

Direct answer: Find out which network was actually built to your plot, in writing, from the developer. Everything else follows from the answer.

Four questions. Three of them decide which of the three causes you are most likely looking at, and the fourth changes what is worth asking the developer rather than which cause it is. Then the tool writes the email, because the developer is the only party who holds the plot-level answer and almost nobody asks them in a way that makes it easy to give.

It runs entirely in your browser. There is no form to submit, nothing sent to any server and nothing stored: what you choose and type is assembled on this page and gone when you close the tab. Every quoted line inside it is published wording from the operator named, and where nobody publishes a timescale it says so rather than estimating one.

Why one network's no is not your plot's answer

Direct answer: One network saying no is not the same as your plot having nothing. It is one company's answer about one network, and there are usually others.

This is the commonest wrong conclusion in the whole subject, and it is an entirely reasonable one to draw. You ask a broadband company whether they can serve your new home, they check and say no, and the natural reading is that your home has nothing. What you have actually been told is narrower: that one operator has not built to your plot, or has built and not commissioned it, or cannot find your address in the file.

Here is the check behind that, because a claim like this should be checkable rather than asserted. Not one of the six operators building to UK new-build developments publishes any claim to be the only network allowed on a site. That is every developer-facing and new-build page the six of them publish, read in full, on the dates in the references. One goes further and states the position outright. Hyperoptic: “Our infrastructure can coexist alongside other network providers.”

One honest caveat, because the encouraging version of this can be oversold. A second network being able to serve you is common, not guaranteed, and on a small rural site it may genuinely be that nothing has been built yet by anybody. That is still worth knowing, because it is a different situation from a wait, and it is a question the developer can answer today.

Who does what, and who knows what

Direct answer: The developer arranges the network and knows which one reached your plot. The operator builds it. You order the service, and nobody does that part for you.

Openreach states the division in one sentence, and it is worth reading carefully because the second half is where buyers are most often surprised: “It'll be the new home owner's responsibility to order broadband from their chosen provider when they move in - we only put the infrastructure in place to make sure they can get this (as we don't sell phone or broadband services).” So the infrastructure is arranged between the developer and an operator, and the service is a separate transaction that begins with you.

The developer's side has published timings, which is useful to a buyer because it tells you how early this was decided. Openreach asks developers to register a site well ahead: “Please register your site at least eight weeks ahead of your site start date and/or six months before the date you want broadband available at your first property.” And it is careful not to promise the date back: “We don't guarantee that we'll meet this date, but it helps us to schedule our works.” Virgin Media's equivalent recommendation is longer still: “We recommend doing this 9 months before you expect homebuyers to move in.” And it publishes that “Our site request service is at no extra cost to you (although further requests for the same site may be charged).”

Which means that by the time you are standing in the house, the decision that governs your broadband was taken months or years earlier by somebody you can email. That is the whole argument for asking them rather than asking another comparison site.

How to get the plot-level answer

Direct answer: Ask the developer, in writing, which network was built to your plot and what your final postal address is.

There is no register you can look this up in. The operators publish what they are building at a regional level and none of them publishes a plot-by-plot map, so the developer or the site sales office is not merely the best source, it is the only one. They are not being difficult about it either: in most cases nobody has ever asked them in a way that made the answer easy to give.

So ask four things and ask them together. Which network or networks were built to this plot, and has the street been commissioned. What the final postal address is, and whether it has been registered with Royal Mail. When the estate roads go to the council for adoption. And, if the answer to the first is nothing, what the plan is. Four answers, one reply, and every one of them turns a guess into a fact.

The tool above writes that email, tailored to what you have already found out, and you can edit every word of it before it goes. If you would rather write your own, the four questions in the paragraph above are the whole of it.

What the developer pays, and why you should know

Direct answer: Openreach publishes it, the threshold sits at twenty plots, and it tells a buyer how likely it was that anything was arranged.

On a residential development of more than 19 plots, Openreach publishes what the developer contributes towards a full fibre build: “Nothing - we'll install Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) for free.” At 19 plots or fewer there is a contribution, and it is capped: “The maximum developer contribution for mandatory FTTP is £2000 per plot.” Above the cap the developer gets a choice rather than a bill: “We'll outline the additional costs over £2000 pet plot and provide the option to pay for these to provide an FTTP connection.”

Hyperoptic's published developer terms run in the opposite direction, which is worth knowing is possible at all: “Hyperoptic provides equipment and pays a rebate per plot.” So on some sites the money moves towards the developer rather than away. And on the timing it claims for residents: “Residents can get online as soon as they receive their keys.” We have not been able to check either against a real site, so both are quoted as what that operator publishes rather than as a finding of ours.

One correction of our own belongs here rather than in the list at the foot of the page, because it is the very page these figures come from that carries it. Openreach's own developer page gives the date the England requirement began as 26 December 2026. The instrument says 26 December 2022, and this page uses the instrument.

What the rules promise, and what they do not

Direct answer: The rules promise a gigabit connection from some network. They do not promise a particular company, and they never mention one.

This page deliberately does not set out the building regulations, because doing it properly takes a page of its own and doing it badly is what caused the confusion this page exists to clear up. What belongs here is the single distinction a buyer needs, and it is this: the rules are about what a developer must install. They are not a promise from any company, they do not name one, and a particular operator's answer about a particular plot is a different question entirely.

One point of detail does belong here, because the version of this page being replaced got it wrong and a buyer could act on it. The cost cap is often reported as sitting over the whole requirement. It does not. gov.uk: “The cost cap of £2,000 per dwelling applies to the installation of a functional connection such as optical fibre to the home (i.e. Requirement RA2), but not to the installation of gigabit-ready physical infrastructure (i.e. Requirement RA1).” The ducting is required without a cap; the connection is the part the cap reaches.

And the geography matters more than most pages admit, because a rule quoted without its country is how a reader in the wrong one ends up expecting something nobody owes them. The gigabit requirement in Part R is a Building Regulation for England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each went their own way, at their own date, and one of the four nations has no gigabit requirement at all.

Getting online on the day you move in

Direct answer: Something that needs no engineer covers the gap completely, which is why the broadband is never a reason to move a completion date.

The plan above is ordered by when to do each thing rather than by a date, and that is deliberate. Nobody publishes how long any of this takes. Not the operators, not Royal Mail, not Ofcom. The figures that circulate, including the one this page used to carry, have no published source. An order built round a timescale nobody publishes falls over the first time the timescale slips. An order built round what you control does not.

A 4G or 5G home broadband package needs no ducting, no street works and no engineer, which makes it the only part of a move that can absorb a delay in somebody else's programme. It arrives in a box, it works the same afternoon, and you retire it when the fixed line is ready. Our 5G home broadband deals and 4G home broadband deals are the short lists, and mobile broadband as a temporary bridge covers the same gap for a single laptop.

If you are renting the new build rather than buying it, the ordering is the same and the permissions are not. Our renters guide covers what you may arrange in your own name, and switching in a new build before the line is live covers the contract side.

Broadband at your postcode

What this page used to say, and why it changed

Direct answer: Five corrections. One is the reason the page was rebuilt, one is a timescale with no source, one is a cause the page never named, one misreads the scope of the cost cap, and one treated England as the whole United Kingdom.

Naming a correction rather than quietly making it is the house rule here. The version being replaced was a clear and readable page, and its problem was not carelessness: it was built from the regulations and a developer-facing summary rather than from what the operators publish about the thing a buyer is actually looking at.

If you read the old version and acted on it, the one that mattered most is the first. A buyer who concluded from a single no that their plot had nothing may have spent months waiting for a network that was never coming, when a different one had already built to the street.