Wales Hints at £70m Broadband Upgrade for 84,000 Premises

The Welsh Government has put out a Prior Information Notice (PIN) on a future project for “Extending High Speed Broadband Reach in Wales“, which indicates that they’re preparing to procure a contract worth around £70m (state aid) to upgrade broadband for 84,000 premises (i.e. those that can’t yet get “superfast” speeds of 30Mbps+).

The new PIN, which ISPreview spotted was published yesterday (here), is currently formed as an “early market engagement notice” that is intended to share the WG’s intentions and evoke discussions with potential suppliers in relation to extending the reach of “high speed broadband” in Wales (i.e. exploring possible delivery options). Various one-to-one meetings on this are expected to take place in May and June 2023.

Just to be clear, the WG seems to be positioning this potential procurement as a complement to run alongside other UK Government interventions, such as the £5bn Project Gigabit programme. “While there are existing interventions scheduled by the telecommunications industry and UK Government public funded interventions, these remote and hard-to-reach areas are not likely to be addressed commercially, and it is not certain that they will be addressed by further publicly funded interventions,” said the PIN.

However, this makes it unclear where the funding for the Welsh Government’s potential project would come from, particularly as it appears to be positioning itself as separate from Project Gigabit. But the PIN itself “does not commit [the] Welsh Government to publishing a procurement“, thus only time will tell how it evolves.

The detail suggests that this is more focused upon the same sort of areas as the final 0.3% of “Very Hard to Reach Premises” across the United Kingdom, which the Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency in the UK Government has previously identified as being too expensive for even Project Gigabit. The UK is already trialling alternative solutions for such locations, such as via Starlink and Oneweb based LEO broadband satellites (here and here).

But the problem area for rural Wales is much bigger, proportionally speaking. At present, around 3-4% of premises in Wales still don’t have access to speeds of 30Mbps+, although we’d expect that to fall to around 2-3% in the near future.

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that last year’s Public Review of coverage in Wales also identified that a total of 327,174 premises might ultimately need state aid help in order to access gigabit-capable broadband connections in the future, which rises to 984,806 premises (i.e. an additional 657,632) if you include “Under Review” areas into the total (i.e. planned commercial builds that are potentially at risk of not being completed).

Finally, the seemingly separate Project Gigabit rollout for Wales has already completed its initial market engagement exercise and final intervention areas are now being developed with the aim of launching procurements by this summer. But we note that are large part of Wales (i.e. North West and Mid Wales – Lot 43C) may only end up being served by a single supplier under a new Cross-Regional Supplier Framework (here and here).

In terms of fixed line suppliers, the main players in Wales are currently Openreach (BT), Virgin Media (VMO2), Ogi and Netomnia (YouFibre).