Scotland Touts GBP9m Grant Scheme to Help Boost Rural Broadband

The Scottish Government has today opened a new £9m Scottish Rural Development Programme (SRDP) to applications, which will offer grants to help support community-led broadband projects in hard-to-reach areas.

The new SRDP scheme, which is expected to run until 2020, will be delivered through the existing £7.5m Community Broadband Scotland initiative. In case anybody isn’t aware, CBS has already supplied funding to build superfast broadband networks around various communities (e.g. the Inner Hebrides [here] and Loch Tay [here]).

Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister, said:

“Superfast broadband is being rolled out across Scotland with Scottish Government support, and we are more than halfway towards meeting out target under the Digital Scotland Superfast Broadband (DSSB) Programme. The social and economic benefits are clear, as demonstrated by this innovative and accessible wifi tourist information kiosk in Oban’s Phoenix Cinema.

This SRDP funding will help communities in the hardest to reach broadband areas follow in the footsteps of the pioneering GigaPlus Argyll project, and work together to bring superfast services to homes and businesses.

This scheme takes the available funding for community broadband projects up to £16.5 million in Scotland, over and above the £400 million DSSB investment. It is another step to achieving the Scottish Government’s aim of delivering world class connectivity by 2020 and, enabling people across Scotland to connect any time, any place, anywhere, using any device.”

The wider Digital Scotland (DSSB) project is also continuing to work with BT to deploy “high-speed fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) services to 85% of premises in Scotland by the end of 2015/16 and 95% by the end of 2017 March 2018.

So far an additional 394,000 homes and businesses have already benefitted under Digital Scotland and at completion this should hit around 750,000, but that still leaves a huge gap left to serve and this is where alternative network providers appear to be playing a greater role through CBS.

Zoe Laird, CBS Director, said:

“Access to high speed, robust, broadband has a transformational effect on how people live, work and learn, particularly in our most remote and rural communities. Our role at CBS is to help communities find innovative solutions and GigaPlus Argyll is a great example of an innovative business model that will bring transformational and robust broadband to the most remote of premises across eight island and mainland communities. The SRDP scheme will enable us to help even more rural communities across Scotland get digitally connected.”

At this point we should clarify that the main Scottish Rural Development Programme is actually said to be worth a whopping £1.3 billion, although only small a slice has been allocated for this project. It’s good news, but the funding is still a drop in the ocean for remote rural areas where new infrastructure deployment can be very expensive.

As usual the new funding is targeted at those areas that exist outside of the current Digital Scotland programme and where groups of communities can be found to establish and scale-up the demand for superfast broadband services through joint projects. More details can be found here.