Wales has added a fifth supplier to its £70m broadband scheme
Wales has £70m of public money set aside for the broadband nobody is going to build commercially. It now has one more company allowed to bid for the work. As reported by ISPreview, an “unforeseen administrative error” meant BB4W Ltd, or Broadband 4 Wales, was left off the approved supplier list for the Welsh Government’s Extending High Speed Broadband project when that list was published earlier this year. It has now been added to the framework.
The project is aimed at around 29,000 premises in poorly served parts of Wales, meaning the places that cannot yet reach 30Mbps and are not due to be picked up either by a commercial build or by Project Gigabit. Openreach, Fibrus, Wifinity and Airband were the four suppliers named in the original announcement. If your own line is one of the slow ones, a scheme on this scale is measured in years, so what is worth checking on a slow connection now matters more this week than the supplier list does.
The omission applied to one part of the scheme. ISPreview reports it was LOT 2, the £10m share set aside for projects reaching under 1,000 premises, which is the small village and hamlet end of the work. So the correction lands on the smaller communities, where the list of firms that could bid was one name shorter than it was meant to be.
That is also the honest limit on this story. ISPreview says the detail of what these contracts will deliver, at what speed, over which technology, and in which towns, villages and regions, has yet to be set out. A decision about who may bid is not news that anyone is building. There is nothing to sign here and no date to hold anybody to. For a single address the only answer worth having is the availability checker, and if the waiting is the real question, how a rollout actually reaches a street is the fuller picture.
A correction is all this is. The framework stands and a name has been added to it, and nothing ISPreview reports suggests the money or the lots have changed. The moment worth watching is when the contracts themselves are awarded, because that is when a list of approved bidders turns into a build plan with actual places on it.