7. 7. Statement: Update on Superfast Broadband

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:48 pm on 13 June 2017.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 5:48, 13 June 2017

In terms of the average speeds across Wales, I think the report you’re referring to is a year or so old now, but I absolutely accept that those premises that haven’t got broadband through Superfast Cymru or through the commercial roll-out are obviously still in whatever position they were in before. That’s what this successor scheme is about: it’s to address exactly that problem.

Wales has a very unique—I'm sure I've quoted this to Members before: Wales's population is spread out right across Wales, and so, to get signal to Wales, you need an awful lot more infrastructure than you do almost anywhere else in the UK. So, in Scotland, for example, the population's considerably more compact, and so it’s easier to get big services to them. So, we have a specific problem, and that’s why I’m asking all Members to help me to get the best information possible back for this map. So, if all of you use your local knowledge—we’re obviously going to be asking local authority partners to do this as well, and business partners and everybody who has written in to us, and we have a comms policy that obviously will include digital comms and so on. But, frankly, if you haven’t got superfast already, then you’re going to be very annoyed if we do a digital comms programme, because you’re not going to be able to upload the GIFs. So, we will be writing out to premises we know may have a difficulty. We’ll also be contacting communities of interest, so the farming unions and other people who have contacted us from business organisations and so on, asking them for feedback from their communities of interest. But there are geographical communities as well that might benefit from a combined response. I visited a couple of very good projects recently in the Llŷn peninsula, where a wireless broadband signal to a community hall has enabled an entire area. Indeed, the Llywydd will permit me in saying that some of them were in Ceredigion as well, and we’ve had some conversations about just that.

So, I’m very anxious to understand what the best way of spending this money is to get to the maximum number of premises as fast as possible. One size will not fit all. So, we’re not going to let a single contract to finish the rest of it off because, actually, that isn’t going to work. We’re going to need specific solutions for specific communities. It’s not a small undertaking, but we’re very determined to get there.

In terms of ultrafast, there’s a big ultrafast trial—I’m sure the Member knows—going on in Swansea at the moment, and obviously we’ll be looking to see how that works, and to see what its roll-out capabilities are. What’s really great about the superfast network is that, although we’ve specified 30 Mbps, actually, the average speeds that we know are being obtained over the network are about 80 Mbps; so, not far off ultrafast, which is normally thought to be 100 Mbps. But, indeed, this is going to be a constant problem for the world in updating these networks all the time, and it’s one of the things we need to keep in mind as we go forward into the future.