Party of Wales Criticises Welsh Government for 2 Year Broadband Delay

The Party of Wales (Plaid Cymru) has criticised the Welsh Government (WG) over delays to their “fast broadband” roll-out project (Superfast Cymru), which they claim means that some parts of the country “will not see any work done to install broadband connections for almost two years.”

In fairness the two year claim isn’t entirely correct since the original contract was extended and Openreach’s (BT) deployment of related fibre-based broadband ISP infrastructure (lots of FTTC and a little FTTP) appeared to fully conclude by around the spring of last year. On top of that commercial operators have continued to work on their own separate deployments, which is separate from Superfast Cymru.

Nevertheless there have certainly been some significant delays in trying to award a new follow-on contract, as well as to deliver on the promised coverage aspirations. Under the original plan the WG hoped to award their next contract (focused on 3 LOTS – regions of Wales) by the end of summer 2018, which officially pledged state aid of £80m to help around 88,000 premises gain access to “superfast” speeds of 30Mbps+.

However the first part of this contract wasn’t awarded to Openreach until October 2018 and it’s scale appeared to be significantly smaller than hoped (here, here and here). The £13 million deal for just LOT 1 and 3 promised to reach “almost” 16,000 premises and 90% of this would be done using Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology.

Sadly this meant that those covered by the remaining LOT 2 (reflecting rural parts of Cardiff, Flintshire, Monmouthshire, Newport, Powys, Vale of Glamorgan and Wrexham) would have to wait a little longer for a separate contract announcement. Meanwhile the first LOT 1 and 3 premises wouldn’t begin to go live until the end of 2019.

Bethan Sayed AM, Plaid Cymru’s Shadow Cabinet, said:

“It has been a year since the previous contract came to an end and there’s been no work done on the ground for almost a year.

Welsh Government has stated that the first premises of the new contract would start to be connected by “the end of 2019” which will mean almost two years without any work by the Welsh Government on the ground.

This is unacceptable. Rural communities in particular continue to go without a decent connection. It has a detrimental effect on farmers and small business who administrate and sell products online which could be devastating at such a busy time of the year.

People in all parts of Wales should have adequate access to the internet regardless of where they live.”

One of the biggest problems facing the procurement in Wales is that BT seems to be the only serious supplier involved in the bidding process. Openreach will naturally only propose to deploy where it makes economic sense to do so, within the available funding and contract terms.

Remote rural areas are disproportionately expensive and if the aim is to focus on FTTP then reaching 88,000 could be very difficult indeed (this alone will also not achieve universal coverage of superfast broadband). At this stage BT has declined to reveal how much, if any, funding it has contributed to the latest contract, which makes it hard to know how much investment is going into the new deal.

As for LOT 2, we had expected a contract announcement to be made before the end of 2018 but that never happened. But if the situation around LOT 1 and 3 is any indication then we’d expected the LOT 2 deal to be equally underwhelming. As ever, tackling remote rural areas by upgrading fixed lines remains a slow, complicated and highly expensive business.

On top of that this process will soon be complicated by the UK Government’s new Universal Service Obligation (USO), which will require BT (or KCOM in Hull) to ensure that all of those in slow broadband areas (where no near-term upgrade plans exist) can access a minimum download speed of 10Mbps+ (1Mbps upload). In practice this is likely to mean a fair bit of extra FTTC and FTTP being deployed, which will be funded by the industry.