Inverness and Highland City-Region Reviews Gigabit Broadband Cover
The Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) has launched a Public Review to confirm the existing and planned gigabit-capable broadband infrastructure coverage within parts of the Highland Council Area, which relates to the authority’s investment under the new Inverness and Highland City-Region Deal (IH-CRD).
The IH-CRD reflects a commitment of £315 million worth of funding – £135m from the Scottish Government, supported by £127m from The Highland Council and its partners, and another £53m from the UK Government. A chunk of this investment (around £30m) will be used to help extend gigabit broadband and mobile connectivity deeper into the region.
The work is intended to complement the Scottish Government’s (SG) Reaching 100% (R100) contract with Openreach (BT) and the UK government’s new £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout. The SG has already conducted an Open Market Review (OMR) of gigabit connectivity across the whole of Scotland (here).
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The earlier OMR indicated that planned commercial coverage for gigabit capable broadband in the Inverness and Highland CRD area would reach approximately 77,624 premises and would therefore leave the remaining 23,645 premises without access to gigabit capable broadband. We should add that 30,905 premises were also considered to be ‘Under Review‘ (i.e. premises where suppliers have reported planned commercial broadband coverage, but where those plans have been judged through the OMR as potentially being at risk of not being completed).
The Public Review process for the IH-CRD area aims to validate the outcome of the OMR and the mapping to ensure that it correctly represents the information provided by suppliers during the OMR and to ensure that the right areas are targeted for government investment. The consultation is seeking views from both the public and other stakeholders (e.g. broadband ISPs, network operators). It will remain open until 7th November 2022.
IHCRD Public Review of Gigabit Coverage
https://www.hie.co.uk/IHCRDdigital
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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