A report today claims that Wales and BT have missed their original Superfast Cymru project target for ensuring that 96% of the country can access a superfast broadband service by “spring 2016“, but there may be more to this situation than meets the eye.
According to the Daily Post, the Welsh Government originally announced in 2014 that it wanted to have fast fibre Internet in 96% of Welsh homes and businesses by Spring 2016. But we recall that the contract itself was actually awarded to BT in 2012 and back then the 96% target was set for completion by the end of 2015 (here) and a couple of years later this was quietly delayed to Spring 2016.
More recently the 96% target has now started to be referenced as an end of 2016 date, which is perhaps another quiet acknowledgement of the fact that covering all those sparse rural areas was always going to be a slow and difficult challenge.
Meanwhile Thinkbroadband’s data, which wisely tends to be a tiny bit more pessimistic than official statistics, suggests that “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) coverage in Wales is currently 87.7% or 86.6% when using the 30Mbps+ figure. However this figure rises to around 92% if you look at the raw “fibre broadband” footprint including those in sub-24Mbps areas.
Regular readers will know that the Superfast Cymru project has historically been very evasive when it comes to confirming what speed those in the 96% target can actually expect to receive, with the project generally preferring to use vague terms like “world class broadband speeds” or “high-speed fibre” instead of clarifying the actual expected figure (we explored that here).
Suffice to say that over the years we’ve learnt to take any mentions of “superfast” speed from Superfast Cymru with a pinch of salt because nobody has been willing to officially clarify whether 96% means 24Mbps+, 30Mbps+ or merely the raw overall next gen “fibre broadband” network footprint including sub-24Mbps areas (we’ve generally expected the latter).
Ed Hunt, BT Director for Superfast Cymru, said:
“Every day we’re rolling out superfast fibre to more and more premises across Wales. This is a huge engineering project with big challenges but we’re delivering an infrastructure that is having a huge impact on the way we live our lives in Wales.
When combined with BT’s commercial roll-out, we’ve already provided more than 1.2 million Welsh homes and businesses with access to high-speed fibre broadband. As we continue to build the infrastructure we would urge people and businesses to take advantage of this technology and give their internet speeds a major boost by signing up with a broadband service provider.”
In fairness Superfast Cymru has made pretty good progress considering the challenging terrain and not forgetting that the umbrella Broadband Delivery UK programme has also suffered plenty of largely administrative related delays too (the actual deployment phase has gone at a fairly good speed, albeit starting a little later than hoped).
Indeed it’s easy to forget that the UK-wide goal of 90% “superfast” (24Mbps+) coverage was originally talked about as being for the spring of 2015, before later being put back to the end of 2015 and then spring 2016 when it did finally complete. In that sense, Wales is no different, but many people in digitally isolated areas will still be understandably disappointed at the delay.
The 96% target should ultimately put around 691,000 extra premises within reach of the service and some 581,000 have already been completed, which is at least reasonable progress. Last year it was confirmed that a further 42,000 premises would also benefit by June 2017 (here), although it’s expected that the deployment may actually continue until around October 2017 (here).
Like it or not there’s still a lot of work left to do in Wales and some additional funding from clawback (reinvestment due to high take-up) should also help to improve connectivity even further, although achieving 100% coverage may ultimately prove to be just as elusive a goal as it has been for the rest of the United Kingdom.
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