Aberdeen Preps Fibre Upgrades and Free City Centre WiFi by End of 2016

Earlier this year the city of Aberdeen in Scotland signed a major £250m City Deal with the Government (here) and we’re now starting to get the first details on what this could mean for digital connectivity, with free city centre wifi and fibre optic upgrades being high on the agenda.

The original announcement pledged to deliver, among other things, a “major investment in digital infrastructure” and the latest update states that the local authority has set aside around £300,000 from the council budget to focus on areas like laying new underground fibre optic cables or supporting the build of free city centre WiFi.

However £300k won’t get the council very far and thus another £20m will also be extracted from the new City Deal, which it’s hoped could then be more than matched by £30m from the private sector. As usual there’s still a lack of detail about precisely what the funding will do.

Simon Haston, Aberdeen Council’s Head of IT, said (Press and Journal):

“We have already begun to upgrade the council network which is a six-year programme. Within the year, we will have upgraded the council’s network which could attract private sector investment of potentially £30million over the next six years.

The city centre wireless we’re looking at is what is called a full concession. That’s where the private sector pay for the infrastructure and get their returns through advertising or footfall.”

Apparently the free city centre WiFi network should be ready by around the end of 2016 and it could then be extended outwards to additional areas. Otherwise most of the funding seems to be focused upon upgrading the council’s own public network connectivity and this may later be followed by improvements to local business connectivity.

At this point we should add that Cityfibre is still busy expanding their 1Gbps capable fibre optic broadband (FTTP) network in the area (Aberdeen Core). Elsewhere around 90% of premises in Aberdeen should already be able to access a superfast broadband (24Mbps+) connection, albeit mostly via BT’s hybrid-fibre FTTC (VDSL2) network (Virgin Media’s faster cable infrastructure has almost no presence in the city).