Ambition North Wales has opened a £18.8 million grant fund to help businesses across the region upgrade to advanced wireless systems, including Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, Wi-Fi and satellite communications. The Advanced Wireless Technology Grant Fund will run until March 2030 and will award individual grants of £20,000 to £2 million, covering up to half of eligible project costs. Delivered through the North Wales Growth Deal, the scheme is aimed at lifting regional productivity and attracting private investment across the region’s six counties.
Grants Of Up To £2m Target Medium And Large Deployments
Alongside being based in the region, applicants must show they can deploy medium to large scale wireless solutions, and must demonstrate how the investment would support outcomes such as job creation and further inward investment. The fund is open to private companies as well as public sector and third sector organisations, with joint applications encouraged. That breadth positions the scheme as an adoption subsidy rather than an infrastructure build, placing the technology choice with the applicant.
How The Fund Sits Within The £240m Growth Deal
The Advanced Wireless project is delivered by Ambition North Wales, the joint committee of the region’s six local authorities, and is jointly funded by the Welsh and UK Governments. Its parent programme, the North Wales Growth Deal, commits £240 million of government capital over 15 years, split evenly between the two governments, within a package worth more than £1 billion once partner and private contributions are counted. The wireless project’s full business case was approved in August 2025 with a total budget of £18.8 million over four years.
A Productivity Mission Under A New Welsh Government
The fund arrives under a new administration, with Adam Price appointed Cabinet Minister for Enterprise, Connectivity and Energy after Plaid Cymru formed a government in May 2026. His department has tied digital infrastructure to a refreshed economic mission to halve Wales’ productivity gap with the rest of the UK within a decade.
From LoRaWAN Sensors To 5G Private Networks
Eligible technologies span the current generation of wireless standards, including 5G mobile private networks, 4G and 5G Distributed Antenna Systems, Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 networks, and Industry 4.0 applications, aligned with the UK Wireless Infrastructure Strategy. Earlier project documentation also listed low power wide area technologies such as LoRaWAN and satellite among the supported options. These systems underpin remote monitoring, machine to machine data sharing and factory automation.
Ambition North Wales points to an early pilot as evidence of quick returns, citing a farming business in Conwy that installed LoRaWAN sensors to monitor water use and reported saving around £6,000 within the first few months.
UK LoRaWAN Rollouts Set The Commercial Benchmark
The fund lands in a UK market where low power wireless is already scaling through utility and public sector deployments. As our previous industry coverage has documented, operators are extending LoRaWAN across shared streetworks infrastructure for automated water metering, including a Yorkshire Water programme connecting 1.3 million meters in one of Europe’s largest such initiatives. Those deployments indicate the vendor ecosystem and scale North Wales applicants can draw on, though the grant scheme itself does not name delivery partners.
Targets Of 380 Jobs And £158m In Added Value
Ambition North Wales expects the project to support up to around 200 businesses and public sector organisations over four years. The approved business case sets objectives of 315 to 380 jobs, £130 million to £158 million in additional gross value added by 2036, and £37 million to £46 million in leveraged investment.
Delivery Pace Will Shape The Verdict
The wider Growth Deal has faced scrutiny over how quickly benefits are materializing. Reporting in June 2025 linked the deal to only about 35 jobs created against a headline target of several thousand, underlining the gap between approved business cases and delivery on the ground. The wireless fund’s employment and investment targets will be measured against that record.
Applications Open Ahead Of A July Briefing
Ambition North Wales is encouraging early conversations with prospective applicants from all industries to confirm eligibility and strengthen bids, and has scheduled a briefing webinar for 10.30am on 14 July 2026. Full eligibility criteria and application guidance are published on the Ambition North Wales website.
