Openreach volunteers have gone the extra mile on Ynys Môn by swapping their hard hats and fibre splicers for paint brushes and shovels to help refurbish the local community hall in the rural village of Llangoed.
In total around 10 engineers volunteered their time to give the hall a new lick of paint in addition to getting stuck in to cleaning the grounds and sprucing up the garden benches and village notice board.
The opportunity to help with the community hall clean up came about as Openreach have been working hard to install its ultrafast Full Fibre network to Llangoed as part of its Fibre Community Partnership (FCP) scheme.
Once complete the new Full Fibre network will provide residents with access to some of the fastest and most reliable internet speeds in Europe – enabling them to meet the online digital data demands of living and working from the village while also enjoying regular cinema nights at the newly refurbished community hall.
Gavin Jones, Rural Engagement Manager for Openreach, said:
“We’re delighted to be able to bring Full Fibre to Llangoed.
“But this wouldn’t have been possible if it hadn’t had been for the community coming together to pledge their vouchers.
“Having ultrafast broadband will be a game-changer for the community in terms of what they’ll now be able to do online – I understand that streaming films from a few cinema nights are being planned on the back of this new connectivity so we’re delighted to have been able to help make that possible. Both in terms of the connectivity and sprucing up the hall.”
In total around 50 communities across Wales totalling around 25,000 properties in some of the most rural parts of Wales could take advantage of this FCP ultrafast upgrade.
Jonathan Lewis, FCP community lead and committee member of Llangoed Village Hall, said:
“We’re really grateful to the Openreach engineers who helped with the refurbishment at the village hall, and I am delighted that ultrafast broadband is being delivered to our area this year.
“A group of us residents worked together helping our neighbours understand what the upgrade to UltraFast broadband would mean. Both the benefits to the wider community of us going ahead, particularly for the more vulnerable, as well as what the potential impact for everyone’s services if we didn’t get upgraded. Many people signed up simply to support our wider community, regardless of whether they felt it would make a difference to them or not – our sign-up to the project really was community led.
“For something as major as this we’re surprised how quickly things have moved from the start of the sign up in January, then all of the work upgrading the network across 600+ homes through to us going live by the Autumn. As soon as it does go live, we already have events planned at our Village Hall with online streaming of sports, films and cultural events plus the opening of a online meeting hub.”
By applying for and pooling together free UK Government Gigabit Vouchers to help fund the build these latest communities will join the 900,000 homes and businesses across Wales who already have access to Full Fibre broadband.
Residents can check if they qualify and pledge their voucher on the Connect My Community website. Using the vouchers – which don’t cost residents anything , enables Openreach to work with a local community to build a customised, co-funded network. The vouchers can be combined to extend the ultrafast, ultra-reliable network to premises in outlying rural areas which won’t be covered by private investment.
Full fibre technology provides more reliable, resilient and future-proof connectivity; meaning fewer faults; more predictable, consistent speeds and enough capacity to easily meet growing data demands. It's also future-proof, which means it will serve generations to come and won’t need to be upgraded for decades.
Fibre optics – strands of glass around one-tenth the thickness of a human hair – transmit data using light signals. Fibre is smaller, lighter and more durable than copper cabling and less vulnerable to damage.
