Swansea Bay City Deal Seeks Support for Better Broadband Infill Project

The Swansea Bay City Deal’s Digital Infrastructure Programme has launched a new Prior Information Notice (PIN), which is seeking feedback from suppliers that might be interested in helping to provide “affordable” gigabit broadband to poorly served premises in the Swansea Bay City Region (Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire, Swansea, and Neath Port Talbot).

Just to recap. The UK and Welsh Governments gave their approval for a £55m digital infrastructure investment under the £1.3bn Swansea Bay City Region project back in 2021 (here), which among other things aimed to expand full fibre and 5G mobile connectivity to benefit residents and businesses across Carmarthenshire, Neath Port Talbot, Pembrokeshire and Swansea. Some of this investment comes from the Local Broadband Fund (LBF) for Wales.

Several digital infrastructure projects are already taking place under this programme (examples here and here) and the new PIN forms an additional part of that. According to the detail, the focus seems to be on finding solutions for 2,363 eligible premises (residential and business) in “both rural and urban locations“.

The premises reflect those that are currently in areas where only sub-30Mbps broadband download speeds are possible and which are not set to benefit from either commercial plans or any future publicly funded builds (i.e. not part of either a UK Project Gigabit deployment or existing broadband voucher scheme).

PIN Statement (Better Broadband Infill Project)

We have recently concluded a tender process for the Better Broadband Infill Project, unfortunately, none of the bids received met the necessary criteria. In light of this, we would like to engage with the market to discuss the opportunity further before reissuing the tender.

We are considering increasing the budget allocated for this project while reducing the coverage targets to ensure a more viable and competitive process. This consultation will help align expectations and provide a clearer understanding of the project’s scope.

Requirements (high level overview, subject to change):

New connection must offer affordable broadband packages for residents and businesses.

New connection must be available to the premise to request a service for a minimum of 12 years with no ECCs to the resident/business.

The network built with the subsidy must be open access to all interested service providers on fair, transparent, and non-discriminatory terms. This shall include both Wholesale Access Products and Wholesale Passive Products.

The solution must provide a gigabit capable connection.

The documents include a map that shows, very roughly, the intervention area – residential premises in RED and commercial premises in BLUE. The fact that many of these are quite spaced out may help to explain why resolving them has been a difficult task. We suspect that several network operators, such as Openreach, Voneus and Ogi, are likely to have some interest given the proximity of their existing infrastructure.

Several market engagement sessions are being planned for next week to discuss all this, although we’ll probably have to wait until later this year before learning the final outcome.