Scottish Gov Stops Community Broadband Scotland Scheme UPDATE

In an unsurprising development the Highlands and Islands Enterprise has announced that their Community Broadband Scotland (CBS) initiative, which provided public funding to help setup new alternative broadband networks in very remote rural areas, is coming to an end.

Instead the team behind CBS is to go through somewhat of a role change to become the HIE Digital Communities Team, which will continue to support delivery of CBS’s existing projects while also refocusing on providing assistance to the Scottish Government’s new Reaching 100% (R100) programme.

The outcome will come as no surprised because had CBS continued in its current form then it would have conflicted with the R100 programme, which recently committed £600 million of public investment (here and here) in order to make “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) capable networks available to 100% of Scotland by the end of 2021 (March 2022 when viewing as a financial year).

Zoe Laird, Head of Communities Infrastructure at HIE, said:

“We thank all of the communities who have engaged with CBS for their support, hard work and passion over the years. Some fantastic results have been achieved and the R100 programme looks set to have a transformative impact and truly bridge the digital divide.”

At the last count we believe that around 20-30 communities had either received financial support from CBS or were in the process of applying for it, which often resulted in the construction of alternative fixed wireless broadband networks. However last year’s collapse of UK ISP AB Internet (here), which had received a big chunk of funding from CBS, showed that such work is rarely conducted without risk or challenge.

Meanwhile some community projects had also complained about delays with the admin side of CBS and securing funding approval (here), although in fairness the scheme had a difficult balancing act to play when assessing risk (as per the above example). Bigger network plans could also attract additional interest and delay from the EU due to State Aid rules.

The focus will now switch back to the Scottish Government, which has already begun the procurement exercise for their R100 programme and this is expected to run until the end of 2018. Hopefully we will get some solid details about their technology choices and deployment strategy either at the end of 2018 or during early 2019, which is about when the current £428m Digital Scotland (DSSB) project with BT (Openreach) is due to end.

UPDATE 26th Jan 2018

We’ve managed to get a list of all the CBS projects, funding and their current phases (August 2017 data). CBS project activity since 2012 has been delivered in two phases to date. Table 3.1 below gives a summary of the 18 individually funded projects in Phase 1. These have approved capital funding, making up 13 community projects, three of which are in the second or third phase to extend existing networks to more premises – Locheilnet CIC, Mearns Internet Initiative and Stobo-Dawyck Community Broadband Network.

Table 3.2 presents the Phase 2 pipeline projects which are currently at various stages of development. On top of that CBS has been working with three smaller projects whose circumstances have now changed, as shown at Table 3.3.