Gigabit Broadband Build to Start for Rural Strathspey in Scotland

The StrathspeyNow community network project, which is being run by consultancy firm Destination Digital, appears to have succeeded in attracting enough interest from local homes and businesses in order to begin the deployment of a new “gigabit-capable broadband” network across the rural Strathspey area in Scotland (Highlands).

We first reported on this demand-led community project last year (here), which had an ambition to deploy a new gigabit speed network that would stretch from Aviemore in the west to Aberlour in the east. At present many people in the area often suffer from slow broadband speeds, although several local communities are already reasonably well covered by Openreach’s hybrid Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) network (e.g. the central Grantown-on-Spey).

The good news is that, after a year of campaigning, the project has managed to attract interest from well over 300 homes and businesses in the Strathspey area, which includes more than 100 in Grantown-on-Spey (this small town will act as the hub for their rollout). Apparently, this is enough to get the ball rolling on their deployment, which is due to begin in September 2021.

Currently, we still know very little about their final rollout plan or exactly what kind of technology is due to be used. However, the project team does clarify that they intend to use a “wireless” solution in order to avoid digging up roads, although it’s unclear exactly what type of wireless kit or network bands will be adopted.

You can deliver gigabit speeds via Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) to consumers in rural areas, but it often benefits from a mix of higher frequencies (20-30GHz, 60GHz etc.) and mesh networking, which can push the deployment costs up quite a bit. But we’ll come back to that later.

Richard Watson, Destination Digital, said (Strathspey Herald):

“We are deploying gigabit-capable broadband wirelessly. As a result, the roll-out is significantly faster than traditional ‘in the ground’ solutions, and we hope to have the first connections live in September.”

The service itself looks set to be delivered by Scottish ISP Transmitair, which is supported by Rapier Systems. The latter is a familiar name because they recently become one of the first broadband operators in the UK to deploy the new multi-Gigabit speed capable 60GHz cnWave (Terragraph) technology from Cambium Networks and Facebook (here). Suffice to say, there’s a good chance they’ll be using that for this build too.

Packages on the new network will start at £30 per month for a 30Mbps download (10Mbps upload) service, which rises to £95 if you want speeds of 500-1000Mbps (166-333Mbps upload). A gigabit speed (1000Mbps+) package also exists, but there’s no price listed for that (apparently, it’s “negotiable“).

All packages include a router, but oddly the minimum contract term lengths for them are all over the place (e.g. 36-months for 30Mbps, but 24-months for 30-60Mbps and 12-months for 500-1000Mbps). We should add that Ofcom does not allow 36-month terms on residential products, so they might need to change that.

The big question mark now is whether this area will also benefit from the Scottish Government’s R100 programme. Details on the final LOT 1 rollout area, which may well include some of Strathspey, are due to be announced imminently. But the catch is that LOT 1 will take several years to deploy, while this community project should be relatively rapid.