Rural Scottish Communities Help to Dig BT’s Gigabit FTTP Broadband Lines

Openreach (BT) is funding a new trial in Scotland that involves the deployment of a Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) broadband network to the tiny remote rural Caithness and Sutherland communities of Altnaharra (45 premises) and Skerray by Bettyhill (100 premises).

The new roll-out is different because it’s being 100% funded out of Openreach’s own pocket and they’re building fibre optic lines from new nodes off the spines direct to local properties (often covering much longer distances than normal). Villagers from both communities are also helping to dig at least part of the network (i.e. making it easier to reach the most remote homes), which takes a leaf out of B4RN’s book and also makes it cheaper.

In Altnaharra, the Altnaharra Estate will dig in new cable which crosses its land. Meanwhile, in Skerray, residents who live some distance from the core network have agreed to dig in sections of cable to their properties, to specifications agreed with Openreach (ISPreview.co.uk understands that this is being promoted to locals as a “dig your own” product).

The project is also likely to be of particular benefit to residents of Skerray, where Openreach’s existing copper cables are buried under the local beach and have thus suffered regular damage from lightning strikes. Slow and unstable connectivity are often the result of such incidents, as well as the potential for complete service failure.

Clive Selley, Openreach’s CEO, said:

“As our core fibre spines penetrate even deeper into rural Scotland, it brings new opportunities to improve broadband speeds for remote communities.

In Altnaharra and Skerray we’re assessing a new concept, building fibre from new nodes off the spines direct to local properties with support from the local communities. This builds on recent partnership and commercial investments in the Highlands and Islands.

We’ll test how we can use the spines to reach very rural communities, and the distances over which we can use fibre effectively. Our learning from these innovative trials will inform our wider fibre strategy and could potentially help us to reach other very remote communities around the UK.

The two pilot communities will see their broadband speeds jump dramatically, as well as improvements to their existing services, so this is a win-win situation.”

Openreach have of course already deployed plenty of pure fibre optic lines to remote rural communities and we’ve also seen them work with local support before too (e.g. the Fell End Broadband project in Ravenstonedale, Cumbria), although their new initiative appears to go a lot further.

Such close community engagement on the civil engineering front remains rare for Openreach and it will be interesting to see if this now becomes more common, particularly as many of the remaining areas left to cover would be very expensive to deliver without help from volunteers. The alternative would require a huge public subsidy.

Sadly Openreach has not revealed any information about the cost of these deployments or their time-scale. We also note that around 200 premises in Bettyhill have already been catered for via the local state aid supported Digital Scotland project and slower (up to 80Mbps) FTTC technology.