Wales Extends BT FTTP Broadband Rollout to 39,000 Premises UPDATE

The Welsh Government (WG) has just announced that their Phase 2 Superfast Cymru contract with BT (Openreach), which is currently building a 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to cover 26,000 premises by March 2021 (here and here), is to be extended to reach 39,000 premises.

The original Phase 2 contract was supported by a public investment of £22.5m, while today’s announcement states that the new “extension will be funded by £30m from the Welsh Government and European Union, with additional investment from Openreach.” Assuming that is £22.5m + £30m (£52.5m total) then the extension is quite a bit more expensive, which would be indicative of the fact that costs tend to rise disproportionately as the roll-out reaches increasingly remote areas.

Readers may recall that the target of 26,000 premises was due to be completed by March 2021, although the addition of another 13,000 homes and businesses to that plan means this completion date has been pushed back to June 2022. In case it wasn’t already obvious from the above introduction, all of the premises in this extension will get FTTP coverage.

All of this comes only a few weeks after the WG revealed that 79,000 properties were still categorised as “white premises” (here), which means they don’t have access to “superfast broadband” and won’t benefit from any future roll-out plans within the next 3 years. We assume this figure can now be reduced to 66,000, which still leaves a fairly big gap to fill.

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

“The covid-19 outbreak has brought into sharp relief the importance of fast and reliable broadband. While the vast majority of premises in Wales have access to superfast broadband, thanks to the earlier Welsh Government intervention through Superfast Cymru, we know we need to reach the final premises without access.

The fibre rollout is part of a package of measures to do just that. The 39,000 premises to benefit from this will have future-proofed fibre to the premises which provides some of the fastest broadband speeds possible. The additional premises I’m announcing today are in areas where coverage is below 90 per cent, so we can make the biggest difference.

Fibre rollout is not the solution for every premises without access to superfast broadband, which is why we have a number of other schemes including the Access Broadband Cymru scheme, the Local Broadband Fund and the Welsh top-up to the UK Government Rural Gigabit Voucher scheme.

While broadband is not devolved, we are determined to take action where we can to improve connectivity across all parts of Wales.”

Connie Dixon, Partnership Director for Openreach in Wales, said:

“We’re delighted to be able to build our next-generation full fibre network even further across rural Wales as a result of this extension. The Coronavirus lockdown has reminded everyone that having a decent broadband connection is more important than ever for both businesses and homes – no matter where you live or work.

So we’re excited to be able to build on the success of our existing partnership with the Welsh Government. Despite the impact of the pandemic, our key worker engineers have continued to build and maintain our network across Wales and have already connected more than 8,000 homes and businesses with full fibre all the way from the exchange to their property – bringing with it access to among the fastest and most reliable broadband connections in both the UK and Europe.”

The new deal is a good improvement over the original Phase 2 announcement, which was somewhat underwhelming after it was only able to harness £22.5m from a pot of £62m that had previously been confirmed for the project. Lest we forget that the WG has also set aside £10m for a Local Broadband Fund, although we’re still awaiting some solid details of how that will work (it sounds like a community co-funding scheme).

Otherwise there remains a big question mark over how much public investment will be coming to Wales as a result of Boris Johnson’s (UK PM) new £5bn commitment to have “gigabit-capable broadband … sprouting in every household” by the end of 2025 (more recently this has become an aim to “go as far as we possibly can by 2025“), which is focused on the final 20% of UK premises and will no doubt also help to tackle the remaining problem areas.

UPDATE 22nd July 2020

The WG has also released a breakdown to show the distribution of the updated roll-out plan across Wales, which we’ve pasted below.