R100 Gigabit Broadband Rollout Reaches 93,800 Premises in Scotland
The Scottish Government (SG) recently revealed that 93,800 premises have now benefitted from their £697m Reaching 100% (R100) project with Openreach (up from 83,419 in July 2025), which is rolling out full fibre (FTTP) broadband to remote rural areas. But the full roll-out is still not expected to complete until early 2028.
The R100 scheme currently aims to cover another 113,000 premises – split across three contracts – in areas that lack access to “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) by March 2028. The most challenging LOT 1 (North Scotland and the Highlands) area is expected to cover around 61,000 premises by 2027/28, while LOT 2 (Central Scotland) was due to reach 32,000 by 2023/24 and LOT 3 (South Scotland) targeted 22,000 by 2024/25.
Just for some wider context. At the end of June 2025 some 81.89% of premises in Scotland could access a gigabit-capable (1Gbps download) broadband ISP network and this fell to 70.20% when only looking at FTTP technology (here). Ofcom predicts that Scotland’s full fibre (FTTP) coverage will reach somewhere between 81-93% by January 2028, rising to 87-94% for gigabit-capable broadband (FTTP + Hybrid Fibre Coax / cable).
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The latest update appears to confirm that the deployments for LOT 2 and LOT 3 have technically now exceeded their delivery targets, which largely leaves the most challenging LOT 1 build left to reach completion. But it should be noted that these figures also include some additional build (overspill), which catches the extra premises that Openreach picks up while working within the same areas on the R100 build (we don’t know how big this is for each area).
| Contract area | Total premises for delivery in the R100 contracts | R100 contract premises delivered | R100 SBVS (voucher) premises delivered |
|---|---|---|---|
| Central | 30,286 | 31,020 | 1,649 |
| North | 60,764 | 30,328 | 3,510 |
| South | 21,889 | 26,648 | 645 |
| Total | 112,939 | 87,996 | 5,804 |
The R100 deployment remains ongoing, but we should point out that Openreach (BT) and GoFibre have separately also recently secured several public subsidised Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contracts for Scotland (here, here and here), which will extend FTTP to an additional 139,000 premises in remote rural areas (focusing on the bits that R100 fails to reach) via a subsidy total of around £288m.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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