Welsh Gov Consults on Gigabit Broadband Coverage in Wales

The Welsh Government has today launched a new Open Market Review (OMR) for Wales, which aims to identify any existing or planned commercial coverage of gigabit broadband ISP networks. The review will help to establish the areas where public investment may be needed to deploy the service.

At present, the UK Government’s new £5bn Project Gigabit programme aims to ensure that a minimum of 85%+ of UK premises can access a gigabit-capable connection by the end of 2025 (here). The effort for this will be targeted at the final 20% of premises (i.e. the hardest to reach rural and some sub-urban areas), where commercial investment models tend to fail.

In keeping with that, the UK Government has previously indicated that “up to” 234,000 premises (hard-to-reach rural homes and businesses) in Wales have been identified as “in scope” to potentially receive a gigabit-capable broadband upgrade (i.e. they won’t benefit from the commercial build and thus require public subsidy to go further). This includes rural towns and villages in Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Gwynedd, the Isle of Anglesey, Pembrokeshire and Powys.

The figure of 234,000 premises stems from Building Digital UK’s own modelling based on all available data, although this is due to be updated again and that’s where today’s OMR comes into play. Such reviews work to identify precisely which areas are not currently expected to benefit from gigabit speeds under existing deployments, or any plans for the next 3 years.

The update is important as a number of operators have recently announced major coverage expansions for their commercial deployments of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology in Wales, with both Openreach (here) and Ogi (here) being particularly noteworthy on that front. Suffice to say that the 234K figure may well shrink, possibly by a significant degree, once all that has been factored.

The consultation itself is open until 24th September 2021 and work is currently ongoing within BDUK to agree the procurement process for Project Gigabit with the Welsh Government.