327,174 Premises in Wales Need Help to Get Gigabit Broadband

The Building Digital UK team has published a new Public Review (PR) consultation for Wales, which reveals that some 327,174 premises might need state aid help under the Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout scheme in order to access 1Gbps speeds (rising to 984,806 if including ‘Under Review‘ premises).

The project, which is targeted at upgrading areas in the final 20% of the UK (5-6 million premises) where commercial investment models tend to fail, seeks to ensure that a minimum of 85%+ of UK premises can access a gigabit-capable broadband ISP connection by the end of 2025, before possibly reaching “nationwide” coverage (realistically c.99%) by the end of 2030 (here and here).

However, the first step – before procurements can begin and contracts be awarded to suppliers – is to identify precisely which areas are not expected to benefit from gigabit speeds under existing commercial builds, which covers related plans for the next 3 years. This is known as an Open Market Review (OMR). Only once you have the answer to that, can you identify where public funding will be needed to help address market failure.

In Wales the current coverage for gigabit-capable broadband is much lower at just 46.40% for the end of 2021 (vs 65.27% across the UK), although this figure will continue to grow thanks to major ongoing network expansions of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology by Openreach (here), Ogi (here), Netomnia (here) and Virgin Media etc.

Last year, the UK Government provisionally estimated that “up to” 234,000 hard-to-reach rural homes and businesses in Wales may need state aid under the new scheme in order to extend the coverage of related connectivity (here). Since then, the Welsh Government (WG) has completed the required OMR and found that planned commercial coverage would reach approximately 681,950 premises within the next 3 years.

The OMR also identified that this would leave the remaining 327,174 premises without access to gigabit-capable broadband and mark a further 657,632 premises as ‘Under Review‘. The latter reflects premises where suppliers have reported planned commercial broadband coverage, but where those plans have been judged through the OMR as potentially being at risk of not being completed.

The BDUK agency has now launched the final PR phase before procurement can begin, which aims to validate the outcome of the earlier OMR. In addition, any suppliers (network builders) that failed or were not yet ready with their plans to respond to the earlier OMR phase can still respond via the final PR phase in order to be included. This is important because the current market is rapidly evolving, with new networks and deployment plans seeming to crop up quite frequently.

The new PR for Wales will be open for industry / supplier responses until 6th May 2022. Hopefully, once this has completed, we’ll get a better idea of how much funding will be directed from Project Gigabit to help Wales close what appears to be quite big coverage gap. Not to mention answering the question of when the related contracts might finally be awarded (we fear it could take until 2025 just to reach that stage).

Wales Public Review for Project Gigabit
https://gov.wales/broadband-public-review-2022