Press kit

Broadband Architect

Everything on this page may be used freely in coverage of the game. Every image and the trailer are the real game running, not renders. Questions, keys, and interviews: tom@tgl.ltd.

Fact sheet

Title
Broadband Architect
Developer
Kolva Ltd — Tom Lee, a one-person studio in Gloucestershire, England
Publisher
Self-published
Release
Steam Early Access, November 2026. Demo at Steam Next Fest, 19–26 October 2026
Platforms
Windows (Steam) · Steam Deck
Price
To be confirmed
Genre
Management sim · tycoon · city-builder-adjacent · British
Players
Single player
Engine
Custom, TypeScript and WebGL, wrapped in Electron
Steam
store.steampowered.com/app/5171170
Website
broadbandarchitect.com
Contact
tom@tgl.ltd

Descriptions

One line tagline

Dig up Britain. Sell broadband. Survive the evening peak.

Short as on Steam

Britain's broadband is a mess, and you're the small company that says it can do better. Trench real UK streets, wire real homes to fibre, and size your network against the 8pm evening peak — when the whole town logs on at once. Dig up Britain. Sell broadband. Survive the evening peak.

Long about the game

You are an altnet. Britain's telephone company had fifty years to put the cables in and has still not done it. You have a van, an overdraft, and a licence to dig.

Broadband Architect is a management sim about the unglamorous machinery of getting fibre into people's houses: trenching the streets of real British towns, arguing with landowners, boring under rivers, and sizing the network against the one moment that matters — the evening peak, when the whole town logs on at once and your backhaul either holds or doesn't.

Real towns from real map data — actual streets, actual buildings, actual premises counts. Route the duct street by street: tarmac costs more than verge, the A-road crossing costs more than both, and a wood is a shape on the board you go round or pay for. Every home that comes on net is a home you physically reached.

Demand has a shape. At 8 pm the town logs on, and a link that looked comfortable all afternoon goes red. Congestion makes unhappy customers; unhappy customers churn; churn kills small ISPs. Buy capacity too early and you are bankrupt. Too late and you are bankrupt with a bad reputation.

Raise funding, service the debt, make payroll. Crews, installers, and the dispatcher who keeps them moving. Chase vouchers, take tenders, and watch a rival quietly overbuild the estate you were saving for next quarter. Grow from one town to a national footprint and outlast every other challenger.

What counts as a fast connection in 2012 is an embarrassment by 2020, and the kit you bought to win the first town will not win the last one.

Hi-vis, tea, rain, roadworks signs, and a proud little company doing a heroic mundane thing.

Trailer

1920×1080 · 57 s · with sound · download MP4 · YouTube · 4K master on request

Screenshots

Shot on the demo-beta build, September 2026, in the game's dark and light themes: Cheltenham at 3,723 streets and 16,000 subscribers, and the six-town Gloucestershire company of the full game. The demo covers three towns.

Clips

Logo & key art

Key art by Lilian Chukmos. No AI-generated imagery is used in the game, on the store page, or in this kit.

About the developer

Broadband Architect is made by Tom Lee, working alone under Kolva Ltd in Gloucestershire. It started as one question — is trenching streets and sizing backhaul against the evening peak actually fun? — and the prototype answered yes. Everything since has been about making the unglamorous machinery of British broadband into a game: a van, a trench, and a backhaul link somebody has to size.

The maps are real. Every town is built from OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey open data, street by street, with the premises counts to match — see the data and licences page.