7. 6. Statement: Superfast Broadband in Wales

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:13 pm on 11 October 2016.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 5:13, 11 October 2016

So, on your first point, of course it’s not just rural, it’s just that most areas where there’s no commercial roll-out are rural. But you correctly identified a place in your own constituency that didn’t have commercial, although, weirdly, there’s a triangle in the middle of Swansea that didn’t have it either. But it’s just a sort of generality that, for the most part, it’s where there’s not a concentration of population.

In terms of the farmers, actually the Cabinet Secretary and I have already spoken about getting data on how many farmers are not connected in Wales. We don’t actually have those data, because that’s not how we collect them, but we’re doing a piece of work at the moment to get the data on exactly how many farmers are not connected. We don’t have the data to know that. But I would say this: first of all, everybody is included in the roll-out, and there’s another year to go, as I’ve just said, for everybody else. Plus, we have the two schemes, the Access Broadband Cymru scheme and the ultrafast connectivity scheme, so if people want to invest in it now, they can do that, and we’ll help them. There’s a sliding scale of how much money the Welsh Government will help them with on that, depending on what improvements in their connection speeds they get.

I recognise the problems that you mention, and everybody has them, and that’s why we want people to take it up. So, that’s why we have those schemes. We’re also working with communities to band together so they can get them as a community scheme as well.

In terms of why we don’t insist that BT does that, the simple answer to that is because it’s not in the contract. It was a tendered contract done through European procurement. The contract is as it is. That’s what BT tendered for. They won the contract. Airband tendered for the 2,000 business premises, and they won that contract, so they’re putting their technology into it.

Our ultrafast and ABC schemes, though, use any technology that’s available to get to the premises. So, the last 4 per cent that I’m always talking about probably won’t be cable fibre. It might be, but it probably won’t be—it will probably be satellite or other digital technologies. That’s not to be confused with the roll-out of 4G and 5G and the mobile infrastructure, which is not devolved to Wales. Although I have constant meetings with the mobile network operators, I have no power over them, so we are just simply enjoining them to do their best and putting a lot of pressure on the UK Government to make sure that we have geographical coverage in Wales as well as population coverage.