Community Wireless Broadband Network on Tiree in Scotland Set to Close
A Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) broadband network that serves the remote Inner Hebrides (Scotland) island of Tiree – Tiree Broadband – has today announced that it is to close on 1st June 2026 after operating for the best part of two decades. Put simply, the local service is said to be “no longer needed“.
The provider was originally setup as a not-for-profit company that was established by the Tiree Community Development Trust (Tiree CDT), which is owned and managed by the local community. Back in 2017 the provider also secured £80,000 from the Community Broadband Scotland (CBS) programme to help upgrade their local wireless broadband network to support “superfast” speeds of 30Mbps.
However, in recent year’s Openreach have been deploying their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across the island, which is before we also consider the presence of Starlink’s LEO satellite broadband service that can now offer relatively low latency 100Mbps speeds from just £35 per month. Suffice to say that the small island community now has options that never existed before.
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Tiree Broadband Announcement
Tiree Broadband will be closing on 1st June of this year.
The plan was for the service to exist until it was no longer needed. That time has arrived! Now that fibre is here and people have moved across to it, the Tiree Broadband service is costing more to run than it is earning, and it’s time to wind it down.
As of the 1st June your Tiree Broadband service will stop and you will no longer receive an internet connection through it. If you have not yet ordered your fibre, please do so as soon as possible. This is a good place to start – https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband
If fibre is not available to your property or you cannot get an installation date before 1st June, email broadband@tireetrust.org.uk with your address and we will flag it with Openreach. If you don’t want fibre broadband then satellite options, or 4G are also available.
We know that many people have tireebroadband.com email addresses. We plan to ensure those are still available, and will be in touch with you individually about that.
We will keep you updated as we continue to wind down. For now, thank you for the support over the years – and your help over the next few months will be much appreciated!
Credits to Thinkbroadband for spotting this development.
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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