Q3 2020 Progress Update on Wales BT FTTP Broadband Rollout

The Welsh Government has issued a Q3 2020 progress update on their £52.5m Phase 2 Superfast Cymru contract with BT (Openreach), which is deploying a 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network to cover 39,000 extra premises in rural Wales. The data to September 2020 shows 14,698 premises have now been completed.

The second contract consists of two stages, the original £22.5m deal (reflecting a target of 26,000 premises by March 2021) and a much more recent £30m extension (13,000 premises by June 2022). The reason why the extension is more expensive is because the cost of deployment rises disproportionately as you enter those increasingly remote and sparse communities.

According to the latest update to the end of September 2020 from the WG’s Deputy Minister for Economy and Transport, Lee Waters, Openreach has so far built their full fibre network to a total of 14,698 premises (up from 9,895 in June 2020) under the contract – of these 3,311 are in the Lot 1 area, 5,018 in Lot 2 and 6,369 in Lot 3 – see below for more detail.

All of these completed premises are subject to further assurance by WG and, so far, 12,030 have been checked through this ongoing process. “We must again remember that the continued successful deployment of the project must be seen against the background of the current pandemic. Openreach has worked hard to maintain the delivery of the project,” said Lee to all members of the Senedd.

Admittedly more than 60,000 are still expected to remain unserved once the current contract ends. Some of that will probably be tackled by the WG’s voucher schemes and community fund, but others may have to wait for the UK Government’s £5bn investment in gigabit-capable broadband to have an impact (it’ll be late 2021 or early 2022 before we see contracts for that being awarded, assuming no delays).

Breakdown by local authority