Written question WQ94150

The Welsh Government’s Local Broadband Fund (LBF) is aimed at local authorities and social enterprises to help local communities get access to fast broadband. It aims to encourage innovation, building on the work already underway across Wales.

To date just over £4.6 million of the available £12million has been claimed from the LBF. Further funding of over £7 million has been committed across the 12 schemes.

The bids received from local authorities and social enterprises predominantly seek to address premises and communities that have, for some reason or another, proven to be a challenge for the industry and other public funded schemes to address and where devising solutions focussed on gigabit capable services may not be possible. The aim of the LBF is not only to directly enable access to faster broadband but also to improve connectivity and to build infrastructure resilience. For example, the funding has allowed the Michaelston y Fedw community led broadband project to house their equipment in a secure data centre and lay point to point fibre direct from the data centre to the community. This means the community’s broadband connections are now fully secure, future proofed and have the ability of offering 10Gbps connections.

The scheme has delivered gigabit access to 153 premises to date, with a further 632 gigabit capable premises in the pipeline and has delivered superfast broadband at sub-gigabit speeds to 125 premises, with a further 693 premises in the pipeline.