The Scottish government has released its new national digital strategy - Scotland's Digital Future: A Strategy for Scotland (PDF), which sets out in more detail how they intend to achieve their digital "ambitions" and improve the country's broadband internet access.

As you might expect their ambitions are broadly in line with the UK and Europe's wider strategies. To be specific, their ambition is to make next generation broadband available to everybody by 2020. They hope to make "significant progress" on this by 2015. However the report does not define what next generation broadband actually is and instead points the UK's wider strategy (Britain's Superfast Broadband Future).

Furthermore Scotland wants the country's rate of broadband uptake to be at or above the UK average by 2013, and should be highest among the UK nations by 2015. At present 61% of the population have taken broadband, which is available to 99%. By contrast the UK average is 71%.


Sadly the Scottish government admits that it has yet to "develop a robust plan" for the roll-out of next generation broadband. In fact it isn't even sure how much it would cost to roll-out, although the report does point to a recent estimate of over £200 Million. To tackle these shortcomings the Scottish government has set out a new action plan (below).


At the same time the government has also published new research on the use of broadband by 1,000 Scottish businesses (SME's). The study found that 25% do not use the internet at all and have no plans to change. Many businesses felt that the internet simply wasn't relevant to their business, while others cited a lack of IT skills.

Of the 75% who do use the internet, it tends to be mainly for email and web searching. And whilst the report indicates that more advanced use of the internet is taking place, these users are in the minority. Examples of more advanced use include social media, access to remote file systems and cloud computing.

Over a third (36%) also reported that they feel constrained by the broadband speeds currently available to them. At the same time 61% believe that they will use broadband or broadband-enabled applications to a greater extent over the next five years, while 45% believe that they will require faster bandwidths within the same time period.