About this site
Broadband Notspot covers one subject: what to do when the fibre rollout has not reached you and is not scheduled to. The mainstream comparison sites serve the 81.8% of the country that has a choice. This one is for the 1,471,838 homes that do not.
Who writes it
Tom Hartley · Broadband coverage, Broadband Notspot
Tom Hartley is the byline behind Broadband Notspot. The site covers one subject: what to do when the fibre rollout has not reached you and is not scheduled to.
The work is mostly arithmetic. Ofcom publishes the build plans every UK network operator has declared for the next three years, broken down by local authority. Most coverage of that data stops at the national headline. This site opens the file, counts the homes each plan leaves out, and writes up the areas with the largest gaps first.
That is the whole method, and it is deliberately unglamorous. There is no insider access here and none is claimed. Everything used is public, the source is linked on every page, and any figure can be checked against the original dataset.
Tom Hartley is a byline, not a company. Questions, corrections and arguments go to contact@broadbandnotspot.co.uk and are answered by the person who wrote the page.
What you can hold us to
- Every figure has a source you can open
- Coverage numbers link to the Ofcom dataset they come from, with its publication date. Where a number is calculated rather than quoted, the page says which columns were used.
- We do not claim to know your address
- Ofcom stopped naming operators in postcode-level data in 2020. Nobody outside the telecoms wholesale market can say what is live at a given front door, so we describe what is likely for an area and send you to the provider's own checker for the binding answer.
- Commission never changes the ranking
- Providers are ordered by entry price. Options that pay us nothing are recommended whenever they are the right answer, satellite being the obvious case.
- Limitations are stated, not buried
- Every option on this site has a section explaining when it fails. A page that only lists advantages is an advert, and we would rather lose the sale than write one.
- Corrections are published, not quietly patched
- Wrong figures get fixed and the change is noted. Write to contact@broadbandnotspot.co.uk.
Where the figures come from
Every coverage number on this site is taken from Ofcom, Connected Nations Planned Network Deployments 2026, published 13 May 2026. Ofcom asks every network operator in the UK to declare what it intends to build over the following three years, together with whether each plan is designed and funded.
We process the local authority dataset directly rather than quoting summaries of it, which is why the numbers here sometimes differ from headline press coverage. Where we calculate something ourselves, such as the 1,471,838homes with no plan by 2029, it is arithmetic on Ofcom's own columns and the page says so.
What we deliberately do not do
We do not run a postcode availability checker. Ofcom stopped naming operators in its postcode-level data in 2020 on commercial confidentiality grounds, and the commercial databases that do name them are licensed to telecoms wholesalers rather than to publishers.
A site claiming to know precisely what is live at your address is either reselling a feed it cannot show you, or guessing. We describe what is realistic for an area, then send you to the provider's own checker, which is free and is the only answer that binds anyone.
How pages are updated
Ofcom republishes this data periodically. When it does, the area pages are regenerated from the new file and the check date on each page changes. Provider prices move more often than that and are reviewed separately.
How the site is funded
By affiliate commission on some provider links, set out in full on the affiliate disclosure page. We run no forms, collect no personal data and sell no leads.