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The Welsh Government (WG) today issued an update on their long awaited £70m (state aid) “Extending High Speed Broadband” (EHSB) project for Wales, which now intends to help upgrade around 25,000 to 30,000 poorly served premises (down from the original aspiration of c.84,000) in areas that can’t yet get “superfast” speeds of 30Mbps+.
ISPreview’s readers may recall that the WG first began to explore the viability of such a project in May 2023 via a Prior Information Notice (here) and we got another update in April 2025 (here). The project is intended to complement that UK Government’s wider £5bn Project Gigabit programme, which aims to reach “nationwide” (c.99%) coverage of gigabit-capable broadband by 2030 (currently at c.87%).
However, it’s already acknowledged that not even Project Gigabit will be enough to completely cater for every remote rural location (i.e. those that are too expensive for even Project Gigabit), which is why the WG decided to establish the EHSB project. This is being funded with £70m that was “clawed back” from BT (Openreach) as part of the original Superfast Cymru project (i.e. public funding returned for reinvestment as take-up increased).
The WG has now completed a period of preliminary market engagement for this new project (i.e. talking to suppliers to gauge their interest and confirm future coverage plans) and has set out their final approach for EHSB, which will now target upgrades toward around 25,000 to 30,000 premises instead of 85,000. This is largely because existing commercial and public sector builds are expected to reach more of Wales with FTTP than first thought.
Rebecca Evans MS, Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Energy and Planning, said:
Despite the efforts of the telecommunications industry and public sector interventions there are still premises that do not have access to at least superfast broadband speeds and are not in any plans for delivery over the next three years. We have developed the business case for a project, the Extending High Speed Broadband project, to address this gap and provide fast and reliable broadband to remaining premises.
The project is being carefully planned and coordinated to ensure that we complement other commercial and public sector interventions, allowing the broadband market to reach as far as it can and enhancing the UK Government’s investment in Wales.
Our 2022 open market review identified up to 84,000 initial premises that could be addressed by the project. However, we are now confident that the number of premises has since drastically reduced as the scope of commercial and other public sector deployments, including Project Gigabit, have become clearer. The list of target premises will continue to be revised to reflect the removal from scope of those premises addressed by other interventions. We currently anticipate that the number of premises in scope will be in the region of 25,000-30,000.
The Extending High Speed Broadband project will be funded from £70 million clawed back from the original Superfast Cymru project.
The dynamic nature of the telecommunications market means that we are taking a flexible approach to this initiative. This will entail establishing a framework of telecommunications suppliers capable of addressing the remaining premises. Once the framework has been created, we will then offer a series of competitive call-off contracts to grant fund suppliers from the framework to address groups of premises. The call-offs will be offered in two Lot types, under 1,000 premises and over 1,000 premises, to stimulate interest from a broad range of potential suppliers.
Taking this approach will also allow the project to flex to accommodate any changes to the initial list of target premises and to address small communities that have been left unserved. We anticipate that the first call-off will be offered in the Autumn of this year with work on the ground starting as soon as possible thereafter. These call-offs will yield delivery projects that will take a number of years to complete due to the nature of infrastructure planning, preparation and delivery.
The catch is that we won’t know how many premises will actually end up benefitting from this project until the contracts have all been awarded. This will in turn be dependent upon which uppliers decide to engage with the process. The WG already has form in working with Openreach, so they’re expected to be a front runner for bids, but Ogi, Netomnia, Virgin Media (inc. nexfibre) are other potential options.
However, Virgin Media’s expansion via nexfibre was recently placed into some uncertainty (here), while Ogi would probably need to secure more investment first and Netomnia has generally showed little interest in public build contracts. But we assume the WG wouldn’t be proceeding with this unless they were reasonably confident of converting it into some tangible roll-out contracts.
We must remember that the WG are focusing on some of the toughest and thus most expensive parts of the country, which is not an easy thing to do. In addition, we don’t yet know how flexible they’ll be, such as in terms of technology choice, which could have a big influence on what is or is not viable for a network operator. Credits to Jack for spotting this WG update.