Digital Scotland Hails “Fibre Broadband” for 940,000 Premises

The £442m (public and private investment) Digital Scotland (DSSB) project has announced that their Openreach (BT) supported roll-out of “fibre broadband” (FTTC and FTTP) services has now reached over 940,000 extra premises, which equates to nearly 95% with access to a “superfast broadband” speed of 24Mbps+.

The project, which has focused its effort upon areas that either wouldn’t have been upgraded by commercial projects or might have otherwise had to wait years longer (if left up to the market), also notes that the contract has so far delivered around 100,000 more premises than originally planned. The milestone figure of 940,000 also represents an increase of +4,000 premises since the last update in September.

The Digital Scotland contract is currently still running and, in these its final months, seems largely focused upon the deployment of Gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband technology thanks to a reinvestment of funding (£17.8m) via gainshare (here). Otherwise the network extension has so far built 5000 new street cabinets and 13,000km of new fibre.

The latest milestone figure of 940,000 was achieved with a deployment in the East Ayrshire village of New Cumnock earlier this week.

Paul Wheelhouse MSP, Scottish Minister for Energy, Connectivity and the Islands, said:

“It is another great milestone that the DSSB programme have achieved, reaching over 940,000 homes and business across Scotland.

It is also fantastic news that the programme has been able to benefit residents and businesses in and around villages like New Cumnock – with deployment continuing across Scotland into 2020.”

Meanwhile we’re still awaiting news of a supplier for the much delayed £600m follow-on Reaching 100% (R100) programme, which is expected to extend the reach of FTTP even further into remote rural communities. Originally R100 aspired to bring superfast broadband to every home in Scotland by the end of 2021 (March 2022 financial) but that target now seems virtually impossible to achieve (certainly not via FTTP by 2021).

The Scottish Government‘s Cabinet Secretary for Rural Economy, Fergus Ewing, has previously staked his job on completing the R100 roll-out on time (here). “If I don’t deliver this by 2021, I think it will be time for [me] to depart and do something else, and leave the job to somebody else. But I can assure you, we’re on the case,” said Fergus in May 2018.

Once again it’s worth reminding readers that the responsibility for improving broadband in Scotland is actually reserved to Westminster, although like many other UK local authorities the Scottish Government can choose to commit its own public funding to the effort (much as they’ve done with R100).

However in the future the UK Government has hinted that it may only supply public funding, such as from the recently announced pot of £5bn (here), to local authorities rather than devolved government’s (BDUK did this in England but not Wales, Scotland and N.Ireland). Handing funding to councils, with the odd exception (e.g. Devon and Somerset), has generally been seen to make faster progress.