Digital Scotland’s Highlands Broadband Rollout Completes

The Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) has today announced that their £146m “fibre broadband” roll-out contract with Openreach (BT) is “making its final connections“. The project has helped to deliver 6,500km of new fibre optic cable to improve broadband across 290 rural communities (benefiting over 193,000 extra premises).

The project, which has focused its efforts 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), forms one half of the wider £463m (public and private investment) Digital Scotland (DSSB) programme.

Overall, the DSSB programme has benefited over 950,000 homes and businesses across Scotland and helped to make “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) speeds available to around 94-95% of the country, but that drops to just 81% when looking at the Highlands and Islands region mentioned earlier (83% if using the older speed definition of 24Mbps+).

Most of the work involved deployments of Openreach’s older and slower Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) technology, although over the past couple of years the latter stages have tended to involved much greater use of gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology. Take-up of these services in the highlands and islands region is around 70%.

We note that the highlands and islands side of this contract ultimately ended up reaching 37,000 more premises than originally planned (110,000+ for DSSB overall), which was partly as a result of “efficient delivery and also from reinvestment” of £6.4m of clawback as a result of good take-up in the original contract.

As the DSSB scheme ends then attention will inevitably switch to the new £579m R100 (Reaching 100%) superfast broadband (30Mbps+) roll-out programme with BT, but we’ll come back to that.

Paul Wheelhouse (SNP), Scotland’s Connectivity Minister, said:

“Along with this great work in the Highlands and Islands, the Digital Scotland Superfast Broadband programme has reached over 950,000 homes and businesses across Scotland and my thanks go to all the delivery partners for ensuring its success.

DSSB has laid the foundations for a robust, future-proof, critical national infrastructure. It is providing lasting digital, economic and social benefit for people living and working in the Highlands and Islands and beyond – something that’s been all the more important during the Covid-19 pandemic.

I look forward to the successor programme, ‘Reaching 100%’, starting to rollout in northern Scotland in 2021.”

Speaking of R100, the Scottish Government are currently entering the deployment phase for this. The contract is split across three LOTS. At present engineers are expected to reach around half of the target premises in LOT 2 (Central Scotland) and LOT 3 (South Scotland) – approximately 23,000 in Central and 12,000 in the South – by the end of 2021, with the majority of the build completed by the end of 2023 (LOT 3 by Summer 2024).

Meanwhile a legal challenge by Gigaclear initially delayed the award for the largest LOT 1 (North Scotland) area (here) – potentially reflecting about 100,000 rural premises across the Highlands and Islands, Angus, Aberdeen and Dundee. As a result, we’re still awaiting the rollout plan for that, but it’s due any time now (necessary if they are to avoid another delay due to the state aid rules changing) and will probably run until the end of 2025 or longer.