Openreach to Start R100 Subsea Fibre Broadband Build in Scotland

The Scottish Government‘s £35m subsea fibre project with Openreach (BT) and Global Marine, which aims to connect 15 remote islands around northern Scotland via 16 new fibre optic cable links – laid across the sea bed, is finally getting underway after an extensive period of engineering surveys and the build of landing sites.

The work is taking place as part of the largest £384m LOT 1 (North Scotland and the Highlands) contract under the wider £600m Reaching 100% (R100) project. LOT 1 itself aims to expand the coverage of gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP technology to a further 59,276 premises in the region, but the subsea project will only account for a small portion of that.

The original plan was to start the construction of the 16 new subsea fibre links in the summer of this year and, with the ships now prepped or on their way, everything appears to be holding to that target. The work itself will start in the waters around Shetland and involve two ships – Global Marine Group’s CS Sovereign will clear away seabed debris, while the Normand Clipper (pictured – top) will lay the new fibre.

According to various ship trackers, the Normand Clipper left Rognan in Norway yesterday and is estimated to arrive at Shetland’s main town of Lerwick on 1st June 2022. By comparison, the CS Sovereign is already positioned just south of Shetland in the North Sea. The Clipper is expected to dig a 3-metre trench along the seabed for the new cable(s) and the longest single stretch will involve a 114km run from Shetland to Sanday in Orkney.

The remaining 15 cables are shorter, and the overall project is expected to deploy around 224km of cable. The LOT 1 contract is expected to complete by 2027, but that mostly reflects the land-based FTTP deployments to homes and businesses. The subsea work itself will finish much sooner than that, and we suspect that most of it will be completed this year.

Take note that the above route map is a provisional one from 2021 and the plan may have changed slightly since then. We haven’t been issued with an updated one to reflect the final subsea build.

UPDATE 7th June 2022

The SG has said that this offshore stage of work is expected to be completed by September. In addition, it’s noted that two other support ships are also involved in the deployment – the Green Isle (a tug boat) and the Global Symphony (there are two boats with this name in UK waters right now).