Plaid Cymru’s 2017 Manifesto Pledges “ultra-fast” Broadband for all of Wales

The Party of Wales (Plaid Cymru) has this week published their Manifesto Action Plan for the 2017 UK General Election and committed to “making ultra-fast broadband available to all of Wales and rolling out 5G mobile signal nationwide.”

Much like all of the other major parties, Plaid Cymru claims that their pledges comprise “fully-costed proposals to ‘protect, preserve and promote’ Wales” (Read their 2017 Action Plan). However the word “broadband” only crops up three times in the document and there’s no mention of funding, time-scale or a clear definition of service speed / technology. Meanwhile the word “internet” isn’t used once.

Plaid Cymru’s Broadband and Mobile Pledges

Where we are:

Swathes of the country are suffering from broadband and mobile not-spots making business untenable in rural Wales.

Plaid Cymru’s answer:

We commit to making ultra-fast broadband available to all of Wales and rolling out 5G mobile signal nationwide.

Where we can be:

Rural communities connected to the world so small businesses can reach their global markets.

Today around 90% of Wales has access to a fixed line superfast broadband (30Mbps+) service and this should rise further over the next few years (details). Nearly all of that comes from Openreach’s ‘ up to’ 40-80Mbps FTTC (VDSL2) network and Virgin Media’s 300Mbps+ Cable (EuroDOCSIS) platform can also reach roughly 30% of premises (note: the two networks overlap quite a lot in urban areas).

Suffice to say that deploying “ultra-fast” broadband (we’ll assume they would define that as 100Mbps+) across the whole country via fixed lines will take a long time and require a significant public subsidy because so much of the country is rural. The private sector will no doubt cater for urban areas (Cardiff etc.) without state aid but smaller towns and rural villages are another matter.

Unfortunately we’ve been given no idea of time-scale, cost or service speed and so there’s really nothing for us to analyse because the commitment is far too generalised and open-ended. As usual you should always take any political pledges, from any party, with a big pinch of salt.