Welsh Government to Open Cable Ducts for Fibre Broadband

The Welsh Government (WG), which is currently working with Openreach (BT) to extend gigabit-capable”full fibre” (FTTP) broadband to a further 26,000 premises by March 2021 (here and here), has announced that they intend to open some of their own telecoms ducts up for use by ISPs to help boost connectivity and capacity supplies.

At present the WG operates a number of ducts, many of which sit alongside trunk roads (including parts of the M4) and are thus used for traffic management systems (e.g. CCTV cameras, digital road signs). Under the new approach Net Support UK (NSUK) have been awarded a 20 year concession, which gives them the rights to build ducts where needed and access the WG’s existing ducts in order to install new fibre infrastructure “at no cost to the public purse.”

On top of that NSUK will also be able to commercialise this network, which is a key change that means we can expect more broadband ISPs / full fibre builders to harness the infrastructure (most likely in order to supply capacity for their own networks / businesses). At the time of writing this only affects trunk roads in South Wales.

The approach itself is nothing new and indeed over the past few years we’ve seen a number of local authorities opening up their existing ducts for commercialisation and fibre optic broadband. Nevertheless it’s always a welcome change.

Lee Waters AM, Deputy Minister for Economy and Transport, said:

“We are always looking at innovative and new ways of improving our fibre infrastructure, helping make Wales a more connected nation. One way is for government to look at its own assets and see if we are making the most of them.

This scheme is the first of its kind in the UK, and is truly innovative as the improvements to the infrastructure come at no extra cost to the taxpayer. Lessons learned from this will be used to support future projects.”

We should point out that NSUK has long been involved with a similar project around Bristol (here), which re-purposed the local authority’s existing 76km+ long network so that it could be used to deliver multi-Gigabit data speeds to businesses.

However we suspect that this probably won’t have a huge impact on rural broadband coverage. The main cost and challenge in those areas often stems from bringing that fibre deeper into remote and sparsely populated communities, although there may still be some areas where these ducts could help.