Scotland Start Open Market Review for Gigabit Broadband Rollout
The Scottish Government has today launched a new Open Market Review (OMR), which forms part of the UK Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout and aims to identify which areas will need state aid support to help spread the availability of gigabit speed networks “nationwide” by 2030.
Just to recap. Project Gigabit seeks to extend 1Gbps download (c.200Mbps upload) capable networks to reach at least 85% of UK premises by the end of 2025 and then “nationwide” by 2030 (here and here). The funding released for this will depend upon how the industry responds and is targeted at the final 20% of hardest to reach premises. So far only £1.2bn has been released from the budget until 2024, but more may follow if the industry shows it can deliver.
Meanwhile, Scotland’s £600m Reaching 100% (R100) contract with Openreach (BT) is already doing quite a good, if somewhat slower than expected, job of extending 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP networks across many of the country’s remaining rural areas by 2027. But a question mark remains over how many Scottish premises will still need a gigabit upgrade once R100 completes.
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The first step – before procurements can begin and contracts awarded – is to identify, via an Open Market Review, precisely which areas are not expected to benefit from gigabit speeds under existing commercial builds – this covers any plans for the next 3 years. The related OMR consultation will run from today until 21st March 2022. This may well then be followed by a Public Review (PR).
We should point out that Building Delivery UK and the Scottish Government are still discussing the thorny issue of how the related funding and procurement will be managed for Scotland. The SG will no doubt want to manage everything itself, while BDUK has been trying to centralise everything around a new Dynamic Purchasing System (DPS) to avoid some of the delays that struck earlier projects (those were shopped out to local authorities).
The catch is that BDUK is taking a long time to get their procurements in England rolling (update) and the longer the two sides take to agree a solution for Scotland, the longer it will be before they actually deliver something practical for constituents.
Finally, we should remind readers of how BDUK / DCMS has already determined that the final 0.3% of the UK (i.e. under 100,000 premises) may be too expensive for even Project Gigabit to reach (we suspect the proportional % will be higher in Scotland). A range of alternative proposals for this are currently still being consulting upon (here).
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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R100 will cover a lot of rural areas but some FTTC exchanges with R100 properties will not get FTTP but only FTTPoD, closer to the cabinets those with 30mbs or more will have to continue to suffer FTTC.
If you go the Openreach website go to the Openreach FTTP Map enter your postal code you can see Openreach plan to roll out FTTP uk wide. It’s Openreach it doing it. The Superfact Scotland R100 is doing it little different.
R100 Has turned into another divider rather than its aim of getting ‘everyone’ onto superfast as intended to some extent it seems.
It’s great that the connections have been pushed towards FTTP it’s the most sensible decision for long term benefit from the investment, on the flip side some will be angry that despite benefitting the most from last programme FTTC they wont benefit from this one and will have to wait their turn along with all the other more economically viable areas.
@True, the checker isn’t really that useful is it, you put in your postcode and it shows a date for the entire exchange area, we all know not everyone is going to be covered.
Gary H +1
I know that if not for R100 even with the local exchange being FTTP by 2026 I would still be on a copper line indefinitely unless I paid for civils. Got that in writing from an OR surveyor.
200Mbps upload? So currently Openreach and Virgin Media offer this!
I live in Edinburgh and don’t even have fibre to my building yet. Don’t you think this should be sorted out first instead releasing this soundbite. While i,m at it don’t you think your priorities should be housing the homeless, employing more Doctors and Nurse, fixing the shocking condition of the road’s. Oh yeah, could you also explain why you have given the Green’s two ministerial posts when they got next to no votes, that’s hardly democratic. Also will you stop harping on about independence as you don’t have any concrete plans. Economically we would be in massive debt from day one. Ps independence means to govern your own affairs, not to let a block of countries dictate to you what you can and can’t do.
Umm, Your building in Edinburgh doesn’t have FTTP yet so the future of the entire countries connectivity should be put on hold until you have fibre ?
You realise government can actually do multiple things at the same time right ? doctors homeless, roads as you say, these aren’t done sequentially, I’m no politician but it seems likely they operate a system of prioritising policies, that said low priority easy ones no doubt get resolved a lot of times earlier than the massive socio economic changes.
The rest just kinda drifted off into a rambling political slab of text devoid of relevance to the Gigabit review or indeed the topic so lets just ignore that part.
I suspect your building probably has FTTC, and isn’t too far from the cabinet, and so doesn’t have only sub USO speed ADSL.
But he lives in Edinburgh so seemingly feels Entitled, as city dwellers seem to do.