447,170 Premises in Scotland Need Help to Get Gigabit Broadband

The Scottish Government has published a new Public Review (PR) consultation for Scotland, which reveals that some 447,170 premises might need state aid help under the UK Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout scheme in order to access 1Gbps speeds (rising to 1,281,434 if including ‘Under Review‘ premises).

The project, which is targeted at upgrading areas in the final 20% of the UK (5-6 million premises) where commercial investment models tend to fail, seeks to ensure that a minimum of 85%+ of UK premises can access a gigabit-capable broadband ISP connection by the end of 2025, before reaching “nationwide” coverage (realistically c.99%) by the end of 2030 (here and here).

However, the first step – before procurements can begin and contracts be awarded to suppliers – is to identify precisely which areas are not expected to benefit from gigabit speeds under existing commercial builds, which covers related plans for the next 3 years. This is known as an Open Market Review (OMR). Only once you have the answer to that, can you identify where public funding will be needed to help address market failure.

The most recent OMR for Scotland, which was conducted in October 2022, appears to have identified that this will leave 447,170 premises without access to gigabit-capable broadband (‘White Premises‘) and mark a further 834,264 premises as ‘Under Review‘. The latter reflects premises where suppliers have reported current or planned commercial gigabit broadband coverage, but where those plans are at some risk of not being completed or the claimed coverage has not been verified (gaps in supplied evidence by providers may also account for some of this figure).

The Scottish Government and Building Digital UK agency has now launched the final PR phase before procurement can begin, which aims to validate the outcome of the earlier OMR. In addition, any suppliers (network builders) that failed or were not yet ready with their plans to respond to the earlier OMR phase can still respond via the final PR phase in order to be included. This is important because the current market is rapidly evolving, with new networks and deployment plans seeming to crop up quite frequently.

The new PR for Scotland will be open for industry / supplier responses until 24th April 2023. Hopefully, once this has completed, we’ll get a better idea of how much funding will be directed from Project Gigabit to help Scotland close what appears to be quite big coverage gap. Related procurements are expected to follow later in 2023 sometime.

Meanwhile, the earlier Public Review responses to the proposed local procurement in the Inverness area have been evaluated and assured by Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE), and soft market testing is now underway with interested suppliers.

Scotland Public Review for Project Gigabit
https://www.gov.uk/../broadband-infrastructure-in-scotland-public-review