Broadband Woes Interrupt Meeting of the Welsh Parliament

The curse of flaky internet connectivity has struck again. A Plenary meeting of the Welsh Parliament had to be suspended for several minutes on Tuesday afternoon after a live video link to the Welsh Government’s Deputy Minister and Chief Whip, Jane Hutt MS, froze as she was responding to a question.

After a few moments of inactivity David Melding MS (pictured) ordered that the proceeding be suspended until they could “unfreeze the Deputy Minister,” which appeared to draw a few muted giggles from across the chamber. A few minutes after that the live feed returned and a brief statement was issued.

“I regret to inform Members that we’ve not been able to re-establish a connection to the Deputy Minister’s broadband. We were near the end of that item and I’m afraid I’m going to have to apologise to Joyce Watson, who I was going to call as the final speaker to put a question, but my apologies, Joyce, I’m afraid the technology has defeated us,” said Mr Melding.

You can see a video of the event below.

Admittedly it’s by no means the first time (here) that internet connectivity problems have disrupted a normal democratic debate. The COVID-19 crisis has forced a large number of politicians to engage in debates remotely via live video conferencing systems, which has on occasion only served to help highlight the problems that some parts of the country continue to experience.

In fairness we can’t analyse the exact cause of this specific loss of connectivity and there could be other factors at work (e.g. consumer choice of ISP package, remote server issues, computer crash, weak home WiFi, local congestion on the network etc.), but since MPs come from all over the country then some will inevitably be living in areas of poor connectivity.

As an aside to this the UK Government’s Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales, David T. C. Davies, yesterday told a commons chamber debate how he was “pleased that 50% of premises in Wales have access to full-fibre broadband, compared with only 14% in the UK as a whole.” Except the most recent figure from Ofcom for Wales is 15% (here), so we assume that 50% is a transcription error or he just got it very wrong.