Forward thinking Council enables Openreach engineers to go further and faster across the county with its full fibre build.

Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council leaders held a meeting with Openreach engineers to see how their progressive methods of working, allied with local engineering teams, are enabling the company to build its new broadband network to more homes and businesses than originally planned across the county.

Council Leader, Lisa Mytton; Deputy Leader, Geraint Thomas and Chief Executive, Ellis Cooper were shown how the exchange in Merthyr is being upgraded as part of the project, before visiting Llwyn-on at the foot of Pen-y-Fan to see how communities are set to benefit from state of the art ‘full fibre’ broadband connections.

 The new ultrafast, ultra-reliable full fibre broadband technology will future-proof Merthyr homes and businesses across the county for decades to come and bring with it access to some of the fastest broadband speeds in Europe.

Openreach engineers are building a brand new ‘full fibre’ network directly from the Merthyr exchange to serve nearly 17,000 properties in the town and surrounding communities with more reliable, ultrafast internet connections.

Providing download speeds of up to one gigabit per second (Gbps), the new network is capable of speeds ten times faster than the average home broadband connection, which means people can surf, shop, game, play, click, teach, talk, work, create, learn, buy, sell and watch without skipping a beat or slowing down.

During her tour of the new network, Leader of Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council, Lisa Mytton, said:

“Communities such as Llwyn-on are one of the most rural areas in Merthyr Tydfil and the services ultrafast broadband will provide are vital so I’m delighted to see the work and investment that Openreach is putting in across the county.”

“We’re working hand-in-hand with Openreach to ensure that our residents, businesses and communities  benefit from ultrafast broadband. Not only will it help strengthen our economy but will be a game changer in terms of how we do our shopping, help our children with their school work, enable more of us to work from home and help our local businesses to succeed.”

Openreach Partnership Director for Wales, Connie Dixon said,

“We’re very proud to be building full fibre broadband faster, further and at a higher quality than any company in Wales and we’re reaching more communities than ever with our team of highly-skilled locally employed engineers.”

“We’re working hard to deliver some of the fastest and most reliable broadband available anywhere in the world but we’re also very conscious that building new infrastructure can lead to disruption for local communities. That’s why we always seek to reuse our existing network of telegraph poles and underground ducts to keep disruption to minimum. And where we do have to close roads or dig up pavements it’s vital that we have a strong working relationship with the local authority so that we can complete our work in the fastest possible time, with minimal impact on the local community.”

“We’re really pleased to say we have that strong relationship with Merthyr Council and, by working closely together on issues like permitting, we’re been able to build our network to even more homes and businesses in the area than we’d originally planned.”

Openreach in Wales

Openreach plays an important role across Wales. More than 2,500 of our people live and work here. Recent research by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) highlighted the clear economic benefits of connecting everyone in Wales to full fibre. It estimated this would create a £2 billion boost to the local economy.

Openreach recently updated its build plan across Wales and the rest of the UK which will be fundamental to the UK Government achieving its target of delivering ‘gigabit capable’ broadband to 85 per cent of UK by 2025.

The updated plans will see Openreach building ultrafast broadband to an additional 87,000 homes across south Wales as part of its commitment to reach a total of 25 million premises across the UK – including more than six million in the hardest-to-serve parts of the country – by the end of 2026.

Around 400,000 homes and businesses in Wales can already order ultrafast, ultra-reliable full fibre broadband.

This short video explains what Full Fibre technology is and you can find out more about our Fibre First programme, latest availability and local plans here.