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Scotland Unveil £36m Extension of R100 Fibre Broadband Rollout

Friday, Aug 19th, 2022 (2:13 pm) - Score 4,496
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The Scottish Government has unveiled an extension of their existing £600m Reaching 100% (R100) contract with BT (Openreach), which will see a further £36m being invested to cover an additional 2,637 rural properties with a gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network. But completion is now 2028!

The original R100 project was split between three contracts (LOTS) and focused on extending “superfast” 30Mbps+ capable connectivity across as many of the final c.5% of poorly served premises in Scotland as possible. LOT 1 (North Scotland and the Highlands) is expected to cover a further 59,276 premises (100% via FTTP), while LOT 2 (Central Scotland) will reach 32,216 premises (95.6% via FTTP and the rest FTTC) and LOT 3 (Southern Scotland) will reach 20,740 premises (100% via FTTP).

NOTE: The average cost to connect premises under R100 was recently revealed to be £5,690 by Audit Scotland (here).

Overall, around 112,000 premises were expected to be covered through the three R100 contracts by around 2026/27 – this window largely reflects the delayed completion of LOT 1 following Gigaclear’s earlier legal challenge (i.e. LOT 2/3 are due to finish much sooner, around 2023/24). According to the last update in July 2022 (here), only around 9,800 premises have so far been completed (up from 5,900 in Feb 2022).

However, the latest extension will add another 2,637 premises to the current target (total of c. 115,000), which mostly reflects an extension to LOT 1 and LOT 3.

R100 Extension Summary

➤ The North Lot contract extension covers an additional 1,488 premises in the following council areas: Argyll and Bute, Na h-Eileanan Siar (Outer Hebrides), Orkney Islands and Shetland Islands.

➤ The South Lot contract extension covers an additional 1,149 premises in: Dumfries and Galloway, East Ayrshire, East Lothian, Midlothian, Scottish Borders, South Ayrshire and South Lanarkshire.

The North Lot extension will receive £20.2 million from the Scottish Government and £9.4 million from the UK Government. The South Lot extension is being funded with £6.6 million from the UK Government’s Project Gigabit programme. BT is also providing an additional supplier contribution of £0.9 million in the South Lot and £0.8 million in the North Lot.

However, the change means that their South Lot extension is now expected to be complete by March 2025, while the North Lot extension won’t finish until March 2028!

Ivan McKee, Scottish Business Minister, said:

“This latest investment will connect more homes and businesses in Scotland’s rural and island communities to gigabit capable broadband. That will have far reaching economic, social and development impacts.

Our R100 programme is going further, and providing faster broadband, than originally envisaged. This takes time and significant investment, but we are fully committed to ensuring that as many people as possible are able to enjoy the important advantages of this future-proofed digital infrastructure.”

Matt Warman, UK Digital Infrastructure Minister, said:

“Bringing lightning-fast and reliable broadband to hard-to-reach areas is at the heart of the UK Government’s mission to level up communities, and that’s exactly what we’re doing in Scotland with our additional £16 million investment in R100.

We’ve already delivered faster broadband to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses across Scotland and there is even more investment on the way thanks to Project Gigabit, our record £5 billion programme to bring growth and prosperity to rural areas by putting them in the digital fast lane.”

Robert Thorburn, Openreach Scotland Partnership Director, said:

“Connecting these properties one by one is one of the biggest broadband challenges in Europe. To make the most efficient use of resources, we’ll align the R100 build with our own rural investment. This will help us to get engineers and equipment to the most remote places, where they’re needed. We’ll continue to explore every option to reach more rural homes, faster.”

All of this is good news. However, using £36m to reach just 2,637 premises returns an eye-watering per-premises build cost of £13,651, which is quite a striking figure and appears to confirm that this is going to some of the remotest locations. It’s also a reminder of just how difficult it is to make a viable economic model to push a full fibre network into such locations.

We also find it interesting that this is being announced before the Building Delivery UK team and SG have set out precisely how Project Gigabit’s funding allocation for Scotland will be handled (aka – Lot 39). We suspect the goal is to maximise the current contracts as much as is allowable, before beginning a new procurement. This is a quicker route to deployment.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
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 and .
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19 Responses
  1. Avatar photo Simon Rockman says:

    Bear in mind this is an Openreach definition of “reaching” a premises, which means they connect a cabinet and say it’s down to the local ISP to provide the connection between the cabinet and the user, then when the local ISP tries to do so Openreach makes it impossible to do so. So this is a scheme which ticks boxes for a government programme, sees OpenReach getting the subsidies and only connects the easiest to do people. Bitter? Yes, I still bear the scars of trying to buy from Openreach.

    1. Mark-Jackson Mark Jackson says:

      Openreach generally does not use street cabinets for FTTP (although it is possible), so it’ll either come to you via a pole or underground from a duct in the pavement (excluding MDUs). Cabinets are more the focus of FTTC.

    2. Avatar photo Alex says:

      This is claptrap. Openreach’s definition of a premises passed is publicly reported and independently audited. It describes that the network is built to close by (typically less than 100 yards) and when a customer orders an FTTP service, Openreach (not the ISP) provides the connection within a matter of days. It’s sad that you’ve had a bad experience but that doesn’t give you the right to make up and spread lies.

    3. Avatar photo Fastman says:

      simon rockman — im afraid you are talking untruths

      from yopur understanding R100 is a programme now at UPRN level from my understanding and recollection so these will be about providing a service to a specific pre determined UPRN and success and payment is determined by that premise being able to order a FTTP service at the end of it (thats what BDUK will be checking)

      not sure what you were on about about buying from Openreach (as you would purchase from a CP) and not from openreach

    4. Avatar photo Robert Thorburn says:

      To confirm – this is full fibre gigabit broadband connections (FTTP)to some of the remotest and hardest places in the U.K. This is not FTTC. This coverage builds on the subsea and backhaul network being built. This investment is critical for island and rural mainland communities and this deployment is a true game changer supporting all that live in those communities or want to move their. To confirm 100,000+full fibre connections will be completed adding to the thousands already delivered. We would love every single home or business to order a service to take advantage and benefit of the massive investment being made if they wish too ! It’s the most challenging set of projects I have ever had the privilege to be involved in, the scale of build is simply off the charts. Trust me this is not a basic build programme in any stretch of the imagination!

  2. Avatar photo John H says:

    My R100 connection runs to the curtilage of my property, 30m of cable from a pole to a wall is the final connection on ordering.

  3. Avatar photo FFF says:

    £13,600 per prem?? Would Starlink perhaps with a monthly subsidy makes a bit more sense in such extremities?

    1. Avatar photo John says:

      Scotland gotta squeeze out as much taxpayer money as possible and then complain they don’t have it as good as other areas

    2. Avatar photo Fastman says:

      john you clearly have no idea on the the complexities for building an FTTP Network let alone a FTTP network on a rural island or islands where premises will be sparse and local infrastructure will be interesting to say the least !!!!!!!

    3. Avatar photo Aled says:

      Pretty much. Otherwise, I fail to see why BT was quite so quick to rollout the Northern Ireland FTTP rollout. They must be at 86-87% FTTP now in NI. that has to have been a political decision

    4. Avatar photo John H says:

      Which only confirms that for some properties on Islands a Starlink solution would be more cost effective and delivered faster.

    5. Avatar photo John says:

      @fastman I don’t care how complex it is, just that it is an insane waste of taxpayer money. Literally the average London salary does not pay enough income tax to pay 14k. When taxes are insanely high, this is outrageous

      Just give Elon Musk 10% of the amount and he’ll be more than happy to help

    6. Avatar photo Fastman says:

      John not sure what the average london salary has to do with anything

      no one get given government mny for broadband either !!!!

      just provides my point

    7. Avatar photo Gary H says:

      No, shut up. Its as simple as that.

    8. Avatar photo Jonathan says:

      @John It’s not an insane waste of money. Governments of all persuasions in all parts of the world have struggled with poverty, lack of opportunity and ultimately depopulation of rural areas. Full fibre broadband provides an opportunity to reverse that trend. Sure you could bung some money to Musk and get a temporary fix that would be slower. Or you could build forever infrastructure which is ultimately cheaper than bunging money to Musk forever. The fibre optic cable that is been put in today is capable of carrying over 1Tbps with an unknown upper limit. You have to change the equipment either end for sure but *NOTHING* will ever be faster. Therefore building infrastructure that will last longer than copper phone lines ever did is a good use of tax payers money. Remember 99% of the cost of remote rural FTTP is in laying the fibre and that is good basically forever.

  4. Avatar photo Gary says:

    The ‘when will I get fibre’ website keeps saying I’ll get it in 6 to 12 months. That’s been happening for about 5 years now.

  5. Avatar photo Brian says:

    Notice after a brief flurry of activity in June, everything gone quiet. Status on Superfastscotland, changed from 2nd quarter 2022 to 2nd half of 2022

  6. Avatar photo Gary H says:

    Little surprise a chunk of fundingis going the the Islands, Otherwise all that money spent on subsea fibre would be a little embarrassing.

    Of course further adds to the evidence that Too expensive/hard to reach only applies if you’re on the mainland thus don’t present such a ‘wow look at what we’ve done’ scenario.

  7. Avatar photo Gary H says:

    R99 project, just saying.

Comments are closed

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