Openreach and Vouchers Bring FTTP to Tiny Villages in Dumfriesshire UPDATE

Openreach, supported by funding from the Scottish Broadband Voucher Scheme (SBVS), has completed the rollout of their gigabit-capable full fibre network to cover the tiny rural Dumfriesshire village of Mouswald – reflecting just 57 properties. It is the first and, surprisingly, “largest” of 7 community builds being delivered via a similar approach this year.

The SBVS is funded via the Scottish Government’s £600m Reaching 100% (R100) project and typically provides vouchers worth up to £5,000 (per property) to connect those properties for which there is no roll-out of superfast broadband (30Mbps+) planned – rising to £6,500 (homes) with a top-up from the equivalent UK scheme in certain areas (or £8,500 for businesses).

The deployment in Mouswald is interesting because the 57 properties – which includes a local residential and holiday park (Mouswald Lodge Park) – reflect a specific group of premises that were “missed out” by past upgrade cycles (i.e. part of the community already had access to ADSL and even FTTC). As such, only part of the area actually falls into what the press release describes as an “internet black-spot“.

Nevertheless, bringing a Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to such a small area is no mean feat, given the high cost of deployment. What’s more, this is the first of seven similar SBVS schemes that Openreach are in the process of delivering this year, with the smallest being just 10 households in Glenfarg (Perth and Kinross). A further 13 projects are also due to follow this model and complete in 2023.

Sadly, Openreach has not revealed any details of the costs involved in all this, which would have been interesting to analyse because tiny FTTP deployments normally tend to be too uneconomic for even voucher builds. On the other hand, FTTP was already passing nearby-ish and the village’s proximity to Dumfries (6 miles away) may have helped the cost model.

Community Council Chair, Mark, said:

“After almost four years of campaigning, it’s fantastic to finally have broadband speeds that allow us to do normal tasks most people will take for granted.

As a church minister, when worship moved online during the pandemic, it was a huge struggle to upload pre-recorded services and was completely impossible to livestream anything directly from home.

I’ve seen first-hand the range of benefits better broadband has brought to the residents of Mouswald, from being able to video call family members, more easily run businesses or work from home, to simply watching a favourite TV show on catch up.”

Robert Thorburn, Openreach’s Partnership Director (Scotland), said:

“While many households in Mouswald were upgraded in previous investment cycles, these 57 properties missed out. It’s been a long path for the affected residents, but they never gave up.

We were determined to find an answer for them, and the Scottish Broadband Voucher Scheme provided the additional funding needed to let us go ahead with a full fibre build.”

Openreach tends to conduct deployments like this under their Fibre Community Partnership (FCP) scheme, but they don’t mention that anywhere in this announcement, which might be because the FCP is currently still suspended (in GB only) until they’ve cleared the existing backlog (i.e. the above schemes were probably already in-flight). But we recently revealed that the current backlog is due to be resolved in early 2023 (here).

The operator notes that their wider build contract under the R100 programme will also be bringing ultrafast full fibre to some further outlying properties next year. On top of that, we’re expecting the UK Government to boost the value of their own voucher scheme in the very near future, which could enable Openreach and others to build into even more remote locations.

UPDATE 30th Nov 2022

We’ve been informed that the build cost for the first community was £47,000 and that was covered by the vouchers.