Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House and Chief Whip – in the Senedd at 2:48 pm on 14 November 2018.
Yes, I absolutely agree that it's absolutely essential. The entire programme has been done on the basis that we provide the base infrastructure and that the person who ends up providing that—so, BT Openreach in the case of the first superfast programme—provides that as an open-access network, and every ISP who wants to have access to that can have access to that.
In some areas of Wales—not Islwyn, I have to say—there are some restrictions around the number of ISPs offering services, because we have the highest penetration of fibre to the premises anywhere in Europe—coming up for 49,000 premises—and ISPs are taking a little while to catch up with that. But as the programme rolls out, more and more ISPs are coming online and the price is going down, as you'd expect, exactly as it did when broadband first rolled out and the ISPs caught up with that programme. So, yes, the entire programme is tendered on the basis that the Member outlines and it's a fundamental tenet of ours that that publicly provided infrastructure is available for all ISPs.