Scottish Government Upgrades Broadband Coverage Checker

The Scottish Government put out a brief notice this week to say that their “upgraded address checker … is now live” for broadband coverage, which apparently “now includes more detailed info on access and our delivery programmes“, albeit seemingly without providing any further specifics to better explain what’s changed.

The checker itself can be found here – https://broadbandchecker.service.gov.scot – and to our eyes the output is still fairly basic. In particular, we note that if your area hasn’t yet been reached by a gigabit-capable broadband service, but it is PLANNED to be covered, then the checker still doesn’t provide any indication of when that roll-out is expected to take place.

Scotland currently has two major gigabit-broadband focused roll-out programmes. Firstly, there’s the R100 £697m Reaching 100% (R100) project with Openreach (BT), which aims to expand full fibre (FTTP) coverage to a further 113,000 hard to reach premises by March 2028 (here). After that there are also several recent Project Gigabit contracts with GoFibre and Openreach, which should reach another 139,00 premises (combined) over the next few years with a UK public investment of around £288m (here, here and here).