Openreach Establish New Board to Boost Full Fibre in Wales

Network access provider Openreach (BT) has today established a new Cymru Wales Board, whose members include engineers and support staff from across the country. The board’s primary purpose will be to provide guidance and direction to the organisation, not least to help its rollout of FTTC and FTTP broadband ISP networks.

At present Openreach is already conducting a significant commercial deployment of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband technology across the United Kingdom, which is set to include many premises in Wales. Cardiff, Swansea and Barry have all been announced in the first tranche of “Fibre First” locations, while more are expected to be confirmed across Wales “shortly.”

On top of that Openreach holds the Welsh Government’s £22.5m Phase 2 Superfast Cymru successor contract, which aims to provide a further 26,000 rural premises with access to “fast reliable broadband” (mostly FTTP) by March 2021 (details). In keeping with that Openreach has also undergone a major recruitment drive that has seen nearly 450 new engineers join the organisation throughout Wales over the last 2 years.

Suffice to say that there are a lot of areas where the new board might come in handy, although we’re a little unclear about how much power and influence they’ll actually have. The Board recently convened in Cardiff at the Principality Stadium to hold its first ever meeting under the leadership of Kim Mears.

Kim Mears, OR MD for Infrastructure Development, said:

“There’s a great deal of work going on in Wales to extend fibre broadband even further across the country and to future proof the network for generations to come.

The decision to establish an Openreach Cymru Wales Board reflects the investments we’re making across the nation and the importance we place on getting this right for our customers in Wales.

We recently established a similar Board for Scotland and it’s working well for us. I’m both honoured and delighted to be chairing the Openreach Cymru Wales Board.”

One mildly amusing aspect of this announcement is that Cymru tends to reflect the Welsh name for Wales, which means that Openreach’s “Cymru Wales Board” could also be translated as the “Wales Wales Board“? So nice, they said it twice 🙂 .