UPDATE Scotland Celebrates 90% Coverage of “Superfast Broadband”

The Scottish Government has today claimed that their £428m Digital Scotland project with BT (Openreach) has successfully ensured that 750,000 extra Scottish homes and businesses can access a “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) service, with “superfast” speeds covering “more than” 90% of the country.

The programme currently aims to ensure that 95% of premises in Scotland are put within reach of the new “high speed fibre broadband” network by the end of March 2018, although sadly this figure drops to 86% for the rural Highland and Islands region by the end of 2017 (here). Most of the funding has come from public sources, with BT also contributing £126 million to the effort.

We posted an update on “superfast broadband” coverage across the United Kingdom last week (here), which estimated that over 89% of Scotland could access a fixed line “fibre” network capable of delivering speeds of above 30Mbps. Meanwhile the raw fibre footprint (includes both superfast and sub-24Mbps capable network coverage) stood at just shy of 94%, although official figures always tend to be a little more optimistic.

Fergus Ewing, Scottish Connectivity Secretary, said:

“I am delighted that more people are now able to benefit from fibre broadband, with over 750,000 premises across Scotland now able to connect. Businesses like this one here in Lochgelly – one of the 77,000 connected in the last six months – can now connect to their fastest-ever broadband speeds for the first time showing our investment in digital infrastructure is paying off.

The programme, is reaching more communities than originally planned and will continue to do so in the coming months. However, local people need to sign up for the new, faster services with an internet service provider, as upgrades are not automatic. I am of course aware that many homes and businesses do not yet have access. Under the further R100 contract, we will be proceeding with the next phase of our pledge to enable access to broadband for every home and business to Scotland within the lifetime of this Scottish Parliament.”

As hinted above, the work doesn’t stop once the current contract with BT comes to an end. The SNP ruled Scottish Government, which is headed by Nicola Sturgeon (First Minister), recently published their 2017 Digital Strategy for Scotland. This document reiterated last year’s R100 proposal by committing them to “extend superfast broadband access to all by 2021, while encouraging the growth of ultrafast services,” although we’re still waiting to get some more details on this (a public consultation was planned for Q2 2017).

Interestingly the SNP’s recent 2017 manifesto (here) stated that the current contract aims to “deliver superfast broadband to 95 per cent of properties across Scotland by the end of 2017,” which seems to ignore the March 2018 completion date on the project’s own website. The use of “superfast” also indicates speeds of 30Mbps+, although previously the 95% target was only ever spoken of as a reference to the raw fibre footprint.

Suffice to say that politicians are notoriously terrible at clearly communicating their broadband targets and we suspect that Scotland, which has an awful lot of rugged rural terrain and sparse communities, may struggle to hit 95% coverage of “superfast” speeds by the end of 2017, although they’ll definitely achieve that figure in terms of the raw “fibre” footprint (including sub-24Mbps speed areas).

UPDATE 11:38am

In keeping with the above, the Highlands & Islands Enterprise (HIE) have also announced that their half of the contract has so far extended “high speed fibre broadband” to an additional 160,000+ premises in the region, which they claim brings the total number (plus commercial roll-outs) of homes with access to fibre in the region to 205,000 or “around 84% of all premises“.

We note that last week’s independent estimates produced a “fibre based” coverage figure of 85.70% for the HIE region, albeit dropping to around 70% for those areas able to receive superfast broadband speeds of 30Mbps+. Officially today’s update re-confirms that “coverage is expected to reach 86% of premises by the end of the 2017/18 financial year“.

Fergus Ewing added:

“The Highlands and Islands project is one of the most challenging broadband infrastructure roll-outs in Europe.

When it started only 4% of the region’s premises could access next generation broadband. Every day roll-out reaches increasingly remote communities and smaller and smaller groups of homes, including locations like the island of Scalpay in the Outer Hebrides, and villages like Lonmore and Roskhill in Skye.”

The majority of the latest connections to be upgraded were previously on the dreaded Exchange Only (EO) lines, which require a complex and expensive network rearrangement to resolve.