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£900k will help hook up 13 ‘hard to reach’ properties to broadband in Powys

30 Dec 2021 3 minute read
Powys. Picture by grassrootsgroundswell (CC BY 2.0)

A local broadband project in Powys is to receive more than £900k worth of funding and will ensure that 13 ‘hard to reach’ properties are connected to a fast and reliable internet connection.

The Welsh Government’s Local Broadband Fund will also provide “incidental benefits” to 139 other properties in six different communities across the county.

The connection will use fibre run from the exchange and split along the route at junctions such as fibre nodes where it will be run to the hard to reach properties.

It is part of a £10 million fund, which was set up to help local authorities and social enterprises in Wales address connectivity issues in their communities. The Welsh Government said it had already helped a number of projects in the first phase and will now help a number of further in phase two.

Deputy Minister for Climate Change, Lee Waters said that fast and reliable broadband was more important than ever.

“While this area is not devolved to Wales we are taking action through our Local Broadband Fund and various other schemes to bring better connectivity to some of the hardest to reach parts of Wales,” he said.

“Good quality digital connectivity underpins everything we do digitally and is the foundation to achieving our ambitious Digital strategy for Wales.

“The fund is already delivering a real difference to communities across Wales in its first phase and today I am delighted to announce further schemes that will benefit from this funding.

“Broadband is a key utility and we’ll continue to support all efforts to boost connections the length and breadth of Wales.”

‘Delighted’

Powys County Council’s Leader, Cllr Rosemarie Harris, said that the news that they had been successful in the bid for funding was “really positive”.

“It will make a massive difference to residents in six different communities across our vast rural county,” she said. “We can now prove that while these properties are ‘hard to reach’, they are not ‘impossible to reach’ if the right support is available.

“I look forward to us engaging with and supporting more rural communities within Powys as we aim to deliver improved internet connectivity to as many residents and businesses as possible.”

Cllr Beverley Bayham, Powys County Council’s Portfolio Holder with responsibility for its Digital Powys programme, added: “We are delighted to have also received funding towards our Community Broadband Team, a marketing campaign around digital connectivity and a technical consultancy that will help with innovative forms of connection.”


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Ex Plaid member
Ex Plaid member
2 years ago

Great news Should have been sorted in 2015 or even 1995. Now who is to blame? https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784. “In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop”. At that time, the UK, Japan and the United States were leading the way in fibre optic technology and roll-out. Indeed, the first wide area fibre optic network was set up… Read more »

hdavies15
hdavies15
2 years ago

That’s what you get time after time because the political decision makers were sold on and became party to the globalist misrepresentation of the “free market”. 30 years on we are a post industrial mess while other countries are supplying key technology products along with all the other consumerist junk to which our society is now addicted. While Johnson and his type are running the UK and a bunch of technocrats run the EU we have no chance of recovering any kind of worthwhile equilibrium.

Mark
Mark
2 years ago

This would be on top of the money that BT received to roll out broadband and failed to complete the contract, despite miles of fibre optic cable hanging pointlessly from telegraph poles, I wonder if there was a clause in the contract that would see BT pay the money back

Andrew Redman
Andrew Redman
2 years ago

2 years ago Open Reach were replacing telegraph poles around Capel Isaac. To this day we are no nearer getting decent broadband . 2 mps download if lucky. Many times have to reboot the router. It’s an embarrassment.

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