Superfast Wales Expands “Fibre Broadband” to 276,000 Extra Premises

The state aid supported £425m Superfast Cymru project, which is working with BT to make faster “fibre broadband” (predominantly FTTC and some FTTP) connectivity available to 96% of premises in Wales by the end of spring 2016, has so far helped to reach an additional 276,320 homes and businesses.

Admittedly there’s still a rather big question mark over precisely what proportion of that 96% will actually receive the government’s stated “superfast broadband” speeds of greater than 24Mbps (Megabits per second), which is something that we focused on in a recent article – Let’s Stop Having Different UK Definitions for “Superfast Broadband”.

Never the less progress is clearly being made and today’s figure is up sharply from 190,393 in June 2014 and 230,000 around August – September 2014. The work itself is generally focused on areas where the private sector operators, such as BT and Virgin Media, have struggled to make a viable commercial case for investment.

Julie James, Deputy Minister for Skills and Technology, said:

“With over 275,000 premises now with the potential to access superfast broadband thanks to Superfast Cymru, this ambitious programme has reached a significant milestone. This is great news for those communities which can now access fast fibre broadband and shows that the Superfast Cymru programme is delivering. The roll out began in Gwynedd and I am also pleased that over 60 per cent of premises in the county can now access superfast broadband.”

Ed Hunt, Superfast Cymru Programme Director, added:

“Reaching the 275,000 landmark figure is great news and we continue to roll-out out this enormous engineering project on time across Wales. We are working in all Local Authority areas of Wales and have connected up many very rural communities such as Rhiw in Gwynedd.

By the time Superfast Cymru is completed in 2016, Wales will be one of the most connected countries in the world. It is a huge undertaking with 3,000 green roadside cabinets to be installed and around 17,500kms of optical fibre cable to be laid.”

At present the programme aims to have enabled around 480,000 households by Spring 2015 (roughly one third of all households in Wales) and the end-goal is 690,000+ by completion, although the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) programme has already allocated an additional £12.11m to the work and this will inevitably extend the network into even more areas (we’re guessing that another 30k to 50k of premises could benefit).

It’s important to stress that the figure of £425 million given at the start of this article is perhaps a bit misleading because it includes BT’s commercial investment outside of the Superfast Wales scheme. Excluding BT’s investment, £205m of funding has been provided by the Welsh Government, the UK Government and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).