Rest of Scotland Confirms Next Fibre Broadband Upgrades for EOL Areas

The £410m Digital Scotland programme has announced the next batch of locations in the Rest of Scotland project area (excludes the Highlands and Islands region, which we covered yesterday) that will benefit from an upgrade to Opernreach’s (BT) faster “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) services.

Just to recap.. again, the project is constructed in two halves – one focusing upon the “Highlands and Islands” region (£145.8m of public and private investment) and the other working to connect the “Rest of Scotland” (£264m). The current aim is to roll-out related services to 95% of Scottish premises by the end of March 2018 (benefiting an additional 750,000 premises), although the target for the Highland and Islands region alone is just 84% by the end of 2016. Work is already under-way to develop a second contract that will further extend coverage.

So far the overall project has already reached its first target on the road to 95% coverage by ensuring that 85% of homes and businesses in Scotland can access a “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) connection (here), while the latest update confirms that nearly 580,000 extra Scottish homes and businesses have already benefited from the deployment.

In the meantime today’s announcement unveils the next batch of telephone exchange areas that can expect an upgrade by this Autumn 2016. In particular this roll-out phase will be dedicated to tackling the dreaded Exchange Only Lines (EOL), which have no PCP street cabinet and thus require an expensive / time consuming network rearrangement in order to upgrade.

Brendan Dick, BT Scotland Director, said:

“We’re pleased to be bringing fibre technology to more rural parts of the country as the Digital Scotland partnership continues on track. This is a challenging project, but we are making real progress.

We’re also reminding local people to check if they’re among the two million households and business premises in Scotland who can already get high speed services. There’s lots of competition in the broadband market, and people may be pleasantly surprised to discover they could be surfing at much higher speeds at a similar cost to their current service.

Once you’ve tried superfast broadband, you’ll never look back.”

Some of the locations that are set to benefit from this latest phase include smaller villages from Drumlithie in Aberdeenshire to Bonchester Bridge in the Scottish Borders. However Openreach’s deployment plans are always subject to change because there’s no accounting for any unexpected complications that frequently only arise after you start the civil works.

Unfortunately BT does not include a full list of individual communities that can expect to benefit from this latest phase, although they do offer a general table of upgrades by telephone exchange area. Take note that up to 80Mbps capable FTTC or 330Mbps FTTP technology rarely covers 100% of a community where it’s deployed in the first pass and Openreach often has to return during later phases in order to complete the work, while other areas may achieve a lower total coverage figure.