Openreach, Fibrus, Wifinity and Airband to Secure Wales Broadband Contracts UPDATE

The Welsh Government (WG) has appointed several network operators, including Openreach (BT), Fibrus, Wifinity and Airband, to deliver their £70m (public subsidy) Extending High Speed Broadband (EHSB) project – extending “high speed broadband” across a total of around 29,000 premises in poorly served areas of Wales (i.e. places that can’t yet access 30Mbps+ speeds).

The actual detail of precisely what these contracts will deliver (broadband technology, speeds, premises passed per contract etc.) and where (i.e. towns, villages, regions) has yet to be set out, but the official contract award notice does at least give us a few titbits of information to play with.

Just to recap. The WG issued a tender notice for their EHSB project back in October 2025 (here), which is funded by £70m that was “clawed back” from BT (Openreach) as part of the original Superfast Cymru project several years ago (i.e. public funding returned for reinvestment as take-up increased). The goal of this is to focus on upgrading the bits that the larger UK focused £5bn Project Gigabit scheme is expected to miss (hence that £70m reflecting a rough per premises public subsidy of just over £2,400).

The current design for the EHSB framework includes two LOTS. The first LOT (1), valued at a total of £60m, will be for projects that require the installation of broadband network infrastructure to 1,000 premises and over (this sounds like cluster sizing). The second LOT (2), valued at £10m, will be for projects that require the installation of broadband network infrastructure to under 1,000 premises (i.e. smaller communities). Suppliers are permitted to apply for either or both lots.

In the end Airband, Fibrus and Openreach all managed to secure supplier status under LOT 1 for larger deployments, while Airband, Fibrus and Wifinity also secured LOT 2 for smaller community builds. As we say, at the time of writing, there are currently no solid details on precisely what each will be expected to deliver in terms of specific coverage, technology or premises passed etc. But we expect that detail to follow very soon.

However, given the network operators (suppliers) involved, it seems likely that most of the deployments will harness Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology wherever possible, albeit with the possibility of some limited Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) networks being used in the most challenging of locations (the last one is more Airband and Wifinity’s domain).

All of the awarded contracts, once announced, are estimate to run from 15th April 2026 to 14th April 2028, albeit with the possibility of an extension to 14th April 2029. All of this also helps to explain why the WG appointed FarrPoint to conduct another Open Market Review (OMR) of existing network coverage just before the contracts were awarded (here), since this will ensure the most accurate mapping of existing and future broadband coverage plans (i.e. refining the intervention area). FarrPoint’s contract runs until July 2026, so we might not learn the final roll-out plan for all this until around then.

UPDATE 12:18pm

The WG are currently unable to comment on the contract award notice due to a statutory standstill period of eight working days, so it’ll probably be next week before we get a proper response.

We should also clarify that the notice itself relates to the proposed appointment of successful suppliers to the aforementioned framework, from which contracts may later be awarded through further call‑off processes. So the actual contract awards and details for the different LOTS will come later.