Final Report Published on Scotland’s Superfast Broadband Project

The Scottish Government has published a final report to help summarise the achievements from one part of their £463m (public and private investment) Digital Scotland project with BT (Openreach), which overall helped 950,600 extra premises to access “fibre broadband” (FTTC / FTTP) services. But it comes with a few caveats.

The first thing to understand about this report into the Digital Scotland Superfast Broadband (DSSB) rollout is that most of it only covers the largest half of the programme (£301m), which is focused on the ‘Rest of Scotland‘ intervention area. Meanwhile, the more challenging  ‘Highlands and Islands‘ (northern) side isn’t reflected fully below, but despite this they still add the Highlands figures into their overall total (950K premises etc.).

The original project focused its efforts upon areas that either wouldn’t have been upgraded by commercial projects or which might have otherwise had to wait years longer (if left up to the market). The Scottish Government previously estimated that, without the scheme, only around 66% of premises might have gained access to such services via commercial deployments alone.

As it is, the entire programme, which began in 2014 and fully completed last year, ended up expanding FTTC/P connectivity to 950,600 premises (homes and businesses) across Scotland and that’s 150,000 premises more than planned. “It means over 98.2% of premises in Scotland now have access to superfast fibre broadband … In some Local Authority areas, access to fibre broadband had been as low as 25.1% before DSSB,” said the report.

One caveat above is that the DSSB report uses the confusing “superfast fibre broadband” terminology (they’ve often done this). According to Ofcom’s most recent data from January 2021, some 94% of Scotland actually has access to “superfast broadband” – defined as speeds of 30Mbps+ (here). Put another way, DSSB have included sub-superfast speeds to reach that 98.2% total (i.e. they’ve included the total FTTC footprint, including those on slower lines).

Otherwise, Openreach’s engineers laid a total of 16,730km of new cable, including 400km of sub-sea cable to connect islands, as well as 5,078 new “fibre cabinets” offering broadband services at speeds “up to” 80Mbps (this is for the whole DSSB programme). But thankfully, we also get some figures specifically for the ‘Rest of Scotland’ area.

Rest of Scotland (RoS) DSSB Delivery Figures

• 757,612 premises with access to fibre infrastructure (732,620 via FTTC and 24,992 via FTTP).

• Home Passes Per Geographic Type – 12% urban, 21% suburban, 31% rural and 36% very rural.

• 4,227 live cabinets (FTTC).

• 892 live Passive Optical Networks (PONs) (FTTP).

• As at October 2020, joint fibre adoption (take-up) had reached 66.8% across the RoS area (their initial target for this was just 20%, not unlike other BDUK contracts).

Most of that FTTP was delivered in the final stages of the programme, as the focus switched from the deployment of slower hybrid fibre FTTC and on to gigabit-capable FTTP. In terms of funding, most of the £300.9m for the RoS area came from the public, but £118.9m also came from BT and £30.6m was later returned by the operator (clawback / gainshare due to high take-up) in order to help further expand coverage.

The study also highlights an older April 2019 report from Analysys Mason, which estimated the total benefit associated with the programme to be £2.76 billion over 15 years (here), although this is for the whole DSSB programme and not just the RoS area.

Sara Budge, DSSB Programme Director, said:

“From the very first cabinet in Kirkton of Skene, Aberdeenshire, to seeing more than 950,600 homes and businesses able to receive fibre-based broadband, the DSSB rollout is transforming lives and delivering significant economic and social benefits.

It has enabled people in the communities where state intervention was required to realise the full potential of e-health and e-government benefits during the pandemic – and helped businesses to survive, adapt and develop new digital models.”

The Scottish Government’s focus has of course now switched to their £579m Reaching 100% (R100) project, which is extending “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) – albeit mostly via FTTP – to the final 5-6% of poorly served premises by the end of 2026 (around 120,000 premises are expected to benefit).

As before, BT (Openreach) currently holds all three of the R100 contracts – LOT 1 (North Scotland and the Highlands), LOT 2 (Central Scotland) and LOT 3 (Southern Scotland) – and the latest progress update was posted in March 2021 (here).