R100 Gigabit Broadband Rollout Reaches 96,347 Premises in Scotland
The Scottish Government (SG) has revealed that 96,347 premises have now benefitted from their £697m Reaching 100% (R100) project with Openreach (up from 93,800 in Nov 2025), which is rolling out full fibre (FTTP) broadband to remote rural areas. The next areas set for upgrade include Hoy in Orkney, Kilmartin in Argyll and Bute, and Inchture in Perth and Kinross.
The R100 scheme aims to reach another 113,000 premises – split across three contracts – in areas that lack access to “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) by March 2028. The most challenging LOT 1 (North Scotland and the Highlands) area is expected to cover around 61,000 premises by 2027/28, while LOT 2 (Central Scotland) was due to reach 32,000 by 2023/24 and LOT 3 (South Scotland) targeted 22,000 by 2024/25 – the latter two have largely already been achieved.
Just for some wider context. At the end of 2025 some 84.18% of premises in Scotland could access a gigabit-capable (1Gbps download) broadband ISP network and this falls to 74.45% when only looking at FTTP technology (here). Ofcom predicts that Scotland’s full fibre (FTTP) coverage will reach somewhere between 81-93% by January 2028, rising to 87-94% for gigabit-capable broadband (FTTP + Hybrid Fibre Coax / cable).
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However, it should be noted that the 96,347 figure also includes vouched funded projects and some additional build (overspill), which catches the extra premises that Openreach picks up while working within the same areas on the R100 build (we don’t know how big this is for each area).
| Contract area | Total premises for delivery in the R100 contracts | R100 contract premises delivered | R100 SBVS (voucher) premises delivered |
|---|---|---|---|
| Central | 30,286 | 32,204 | 1,835 |
| North | 60,764 | 31,237 | 3,576 |
| South | 21,889 | 26,841 | 654 |
| Total | 112,939 | 90,282 | 6,065 |
The R100 roll-out is still ongoing, but we should point out that Openreach (BT) and GoFibre have separately also recently secured several public subsidised Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contracts for Scotland (here, here and here), which will extend FTTP to an additional 139,000 premises in remote rural areas (focusing on the bits that R100 fails to reach) via an additional public subsidy total of around £288m.
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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