First Rural Full Fibre Customers Go Live in Pembrokeshire Scheme

The Pembrokeshire County Council’s (PCC) wider Digital Connectivity Programme (DCP) in Wales, which is working with several UK ISPs to rollout gigabit-capable full fibre broadband networks into several remote rural communities, has just seen their first customers go live.

So far most of the contracts for the first Phase 1-3 villages have already been won by either Broadway Partners or Dyfed IT (here), although other operators (e.g. Openreach) have bid on some of the same areas. All of those seem set to benefit from a deployment of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology.

Building across the initial Phase 1 areas of Dale, New Moat, Ambleston and Crymych got underway earlier this year and now some of the first customers have just been connected in the small village of Wallis (here), which sits just next to Ambleston. Further connections are due to follow in the coming months.

Assuming all goes to plan, then all the planned builds – currently stretching across five phases (see below) – should be finished by 2023 or well before then.

Paul Miller, Pembrokeshire County Council Cabinet Member, said:

“It was great to watch the first connection go live last week. It was the culmination of months of hard work by our Digital Pembrokeshire team and by suppliers Broadway Partners.

Without our intervention programme, communities like these simply would not have been on the radar for a full fibre connection.

It could have been a decade before real digital connectivity reached rural north Pembrokeshire and all the while our communities would have been falling further and further behind, excluded from the everyday digital services we all take for granted.

With this new, gigabit-capable, connection Mr and Miss Thomas are now able to access among the fastest broadband speeds in the country and from here the roll-out starts at pace.

I’m committed to ensuring that every Pembrokeshire home and business is able to access gigabit capable broadband and to making sure our Pembrokeshire communities are among the very best digitally connected in all of the UK.”

The PCC is understood to have committed £2m of its own funding to help support their new Digital Connectivity Programme (DCP), which will be supported by gigabit vouchers from the UK government. On top of that they also secured £4m of public funding from the Local Full Fibre Networks (LFFN) programme in order to improve connectivity to public sector sites.

Customers of Broadway Broadband‘s service typically pay from just £19.99 per month for an unlimited 100Mbps package with a free installation, which rises to £39.99 if you want their 300Mbps plan and £69.99 for their top 1000Mbps package.

You can see a summary of the various build phases (those announced so far) below, although we don’t yet know which operators have secured the various phase 3 and 5 contracts. Otherwise, Phase 1 project areas show in green below, while Phase 2 project areas are orange, Phase 3 purple, Phase 4 blue and Phase 5 are in pink.