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SG Issues Short Update on Scotland’s R100 Fibre Broadband Build

Thursday, Feb 9th, 2023 (9:15 am) - Score 1,784
Digital-Scotland-Website-on-Laptop

The Scottish Government has released a small update on the progress of their £600m Reaching 100% (R100) project with Openreach (BT). This confirms that a total of 16,600 rural properties have so far been covered by a fixed “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) ISP network under the scheme (inc. 2,800 connections via R100 vouchers).

At present more than 95% of premises in Scotland already have access to a 30Mbps+ capable network and a further 114,869 premises are planned to be covered through the three R100 contract LOTs by March 2028 (here and here). LOT 1 (North Scotland and the Highlands) is expected to cover around 59,000 premises (100% via FTTP) by 2027/28, while LOT 2 (Central Scotland) will reach 32,000 premises (95.6% via FTTP and the rest FTTC) by 2023/24 and LOT 3 (Southern Scotland) will reach 21,000 premises (100% via FTTP) by 2024/25.

NOTE: In Scotland the responsibility for broadband is technically devolved to Westminster, but that doesn’t stop local and devolved authorities from making their own investments (e.g. R100).

The latest progress update on this project doesn’t tell us much that we didn’t already know, although it’s interesting to note that the Scottish Government is still trying to convince people that the voucher scheme has already enabled them to achieve the original R100 completion target. The previous goal was for the rollout to complete by the end of 2021, which of course never happened.

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Ivan McKee, Minister for Business, said:

“As at 31 December 2021, all homes and business across Scotland had the ability to access a superfast broadband connection through one of the three strands of activity that make up the R100—reaching 100 per cent—programme: the £600 million R100 contracts, the demand-led R100 Scottish broadband voucher scheme and commercial coverage.

By the end of December 2022, the R100 contracts had built connections to more than 16,600 properties across the length and breadth of Scotland, with more than 2,800 connections also delivered through R100 vouchers.

The voucher scheme was put in place to ensure that anyone who wanted to connect as at that date was able to do so”

Just to be clear, if voucher schemes were the answer to everything then the UK’s various governments would have said “job done” years ago and stopped investing, but the reality is usually quite different from that of the political sales pitch. As such, “all homes and business across Scotland” most certainly did NOT have “the ability to access a superfast broadband connection” by the end of 2021, as claimed above.

The reality is that many people aren’t even aware that such vouchers exist and, short of opting for a quick-fix via a satellite (many of these have big limitations) or mobile broadband solution (where viable), any associated applications that require a new network to be established could still take many months or years to actually be built.

Not to mention that some areas will still be too expensive for even vouchers to tackle (costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds to serve a sparse area). The arrival of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) based satellite broadband services, such as Starlink, does help, but the monthly fees for that are still too expensive for many homes to view it as “affordable” (it would need to be nearer the £30 – £45 mark). The other catch being that Starlink wasn’t available to the majority of Scotland until late 2022, and it still doesn’t reach some parts of northern Shetland today.

Meanwhile, we’re still waiting to hear how Project Gigabit’s funding for Scotland (aka – Lot 39) will be handled, although the Building Digital UK (BDUK) programme has warned that the final 0.3% of the UK (i.e. under 100,000 premises) may be too expensive for even that project to reach with full fibre (a lot of that will be in Scotland). A range of alternative proposals for this are currently still being examined (here) and trialled (here).

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Ivan McKee said:

“The Scottish Government continues to work closely with the United Kingdom Government to shape what project gigabit will look like in Scotland. To date, we have secured £28.5 million of funding, which is being used to enhance and extend R100 contract coverage across rural Scotland.

The UK Government has not provided a Scotland-wide allocation of project gigabit funding that would allow things to move forward at maximum pace. We should also recognise that that £28.5 million is out of a total of £1.2 billion confirmed by the UK Government, which is out of a total of £5 billion that it originally committed to that programme.

In the weeks ahead, we will engage with broadband infrastructure providers to understand their current and future gigabit delivery plans and to gauge their level of interest in bidding for new broadband contracts in Scotland. It is vital that the UK Government commits a level of funding that will extend gigabit connectivity to Scotland’s rural and island communities, as well as urban and semi-urban areas, to ensure that no one is left behind.”

The longer it takes to decide how to handle the allocation of new funding from Project Gigabit, the longer it will take Scotland to deliver gigabit-capable coverage nationwide. At the end of last year around 66.80% of Scotland already had access to a gigabit-capable broadband connection, so there’s still a long way to go and most of the current build has come from commercial deployments. But.. politics.

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

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  1. Avatar photo Ian says:

    My LOT 1 connection came in a month late which is pretty good going, I was hoping it would be on time but… well, they did a lot of work over the winter in pretty rough conditions so fair’s fair.

    I’m just happy something finally happened after years (decades) of nothing.

    1. Avatar photo Robert thorburn says:

      That’s great to hear you are connected and benefitting from the network build.

  2. Avatar photo Brian says:

    My LOT 3 connection had been due first half 2022, then revised to second half 2022 (still saying that on Digital Scotland). There had been a relative flurry of activity November/December, duct has been mole ploughed in, chambers installed, and I believe the fibre is installed and spliced, but there seems to be area 1.5 miles down the line where its due to be on poles, but currently the poles are empty.

    1. Avatar photo Robert thorburn says:

      Sounds positive progress. There are reasons why some structures
      or premises can be delayed but if you want to raise a query on the website itself at https://www.scotlandsuperfast.com/ / they may be able to advise what’s happening especially if slightly later than planned . There are hundreds more connections going live every week, so will be a matter of time if vast majority of network is built.
      It’s a massively exciting programme. Hope your connected very soon and enjoy using your full fibre service .

    2. Avatar photo Brian says:

      Timeframe eventually updated to end of march, mow end of June, so full 12 months slippage.

  3. Avatar photo correction says:

    The statement about responsibility for broadband being devolved to Westminster is incorrect. It is a reserved responsibility for Westminster.

  4. Avatar photo IW says:

    Been chekcing the Digital Scotland website almost weekly and our home was scheduled in for first half of 2023. Checked today and its been revised to a weak message stating:

    “We’ll provide an update on this when appropriate with the intention of confirming your build schedule in the second half of this year.”

    The houses just shy of 90 metres away from us on the same street have received their FTTP though. Very frustrating and quite dissappointing. Relying on the 4G for now i guess!

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