Rural Wales Village of Rhydlewis Raises £1.4m to Complete FTTP Broadband Build
Residents covered by the Rhydlewis Exchange in Ceredigion (Wales), which serves 1,058 premises across 127 postcodes, may be pleased to learn that their stop-start deployment of a new Openreach based Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network can now finally complete after they worked together to raise £1.4m in pledges.
The exchange previously had some of the lowest fibre (FTTP) coverage in the county, with just 30% of local homes and businesses able to access such a network, but that is now set to change. Work to roll-out the new network did in fact start once before, after the community succeeded in securing pledges for 217 vouchers under the government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS) by the summer of 2024.
“Unfortunately by the summer of 2025, it was obvious the network build had dramatically slowed down and in June 2025 Openreach informed the community it had experienced unexpected challenges and costs and needed to raise the target to 325 voucher pledges to ensure the complete network build,” said local resident Sandy to ISPreview.
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Thankfully, the same small community action group that had been so effective at raising the initial batch of funding was able to spring into action again and raise pledges for a total of 325 vouchers (£1.4m). The catchment area was also increased to include over 800+ premises (up from 700+ originally). All of this was enough for Openreach to continue the build.
A Spokesperson for Ceredigion County Council said:
“This latest milestone shows what’s possible when rural communities come together to secure investment in their digital future – and offers encouragement to others still working towards their own targets in Velindre, Maesycrugiau, and Llandysul.”
At present some 154 premises are already Ready for Service (RFS) with the new full fibre network and work can now continue across the catchment. The bulk of this roll-out is due to complete by the end of 2025, although a few properties won’t be covered until the Spring of 2026 due to delays caused by road closure procedures.
“We are very grateful for the support of our local MP, Ben Lake, Senydd Member, Elin Jones, and the local council, Ceredigion County Council. So, come the Spring of 2026 our rural community should be celebrating the success of FTTP!,” said Sandy. We should point out that the community has been designated a Voucher Priority Area (VPA) by the government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Poor people. All that effort into raising the money, only to have a legacy GPON product delivered instead of a beautiful symmetric product using XGS-PON. It’s out of date before it even started.
Hopefully, BT will be forced into migrating off legacy GPON not too far into the future when the person who insists on GPON being still rolled out, is fired and made an example of 🙂
really
what utter noise
meanwhile they get connected to the network with the best financial viability and the largest choice of ISP. I’d be surprised if this, as with any recent Openreach build activity, is not built with the impending XGS rollout in mind. I can’t wait to see your new talking point if Openreach manage to become the largest XGS operator virtually overnight.
I’d prefer it over virtually any altnet. We are perhaps also forgetting that the voucher scheme is a form of open tender, so any of the XGS boys could bid if they wanted to. Of course it’s left to the national champion to do the hard work as usual.
Am pretty sure the locals would be perfectly happy with an upgrade from sub-10 meg to 1+ gig. There are unlikely to be any ultra high tech companies requiring 10+gig connections..
BT Ivor, If they go XGS-PON and Symmetric (without silly upload speed tiers), I’ll go quiet 🙂
For Altnets letting BT do the work; that’s business. They pay rent for PIA. If BT can do decisions for “business” so can competitors. Without them, BT would have done NO work…..
Approximately 31% of UK premises do not have access to Openreach full-fibre broadband, and this in the year 2025. Doesn’t that show the incompetence of BT/Openreach? Openreach should be completely separated from BT and become a re-nationalised network. There will always be properties harder to reach with fibre, but hey, this is no excuse for the BT Can’t Do culture. How did they ever manage to build telecom services in the past? Masts, ducts, and a lot of infrastructure is already there! So what has gone wrong here?