Scotland’s R100 gigabit broadband scheme shortlisted for European award
The Scottish Government’s (SG) £697m Reaching 100% (R100) programme with Openreach (BT), which has spent the past few years expanding full fibre broadband to reach 100,000 premises in hard-to-reach rural areas, has recently been shortlisted for the forthcoming European Digital Connectivity Awards 2026.
A total of nine projects were nominated by the jury for the 2026 finals across three categories, with Scotland’s R100 scheme being nominated under the second category for “Champions in addressing digital divide in rural and remote areas“. The nominated projects will gather in Brussels on 2nd December 2026, when the European Commission will announce and honour the three winners from each category. The competition is open to projects from across the broader European continent, not just EU member states, hence why Scotland has been considered.
The R100 scheme is currently contracted to reach a total of 112,939 premises by March 2028 – split across three contracts – in areas that lack access to “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+). 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.
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The R100 roll-out is ongoing, but Openreach and GoFibre have more recently also secured several additional publicly subsidised gigabit broadband roll-out contracts for Scotland under the UK’s wider £5bn Project Gigabit scheme (here, here and here). Over the next few years this will extend FTTP to an additional 139,000 premises in remote rural areas of Scotland via an additional public subsidy of around £288m (i.e. focusing on the bits that R100 fails to reach).
At present around 98% of premises in Scotland have access to 30Mbps+ speeds via fixed lines and this falls to c.87% for gigabit-capable broadband (here). Ofcom are forecasting gigabit speeds could reach up to 93% of Scotland by January 2029 (here).
Shortlist of the European Digital Connectivity Awards 2026
Category 1. Excellence and innovation in deployment of Gigabit-Ready Infrastructure
➤ 5G Mobile Healthcare Innovative Solutions (5GMHI), Sweden
➤ 5G for a Better Tomorrow: Protecting Lives and the Environment in Riga and Turin (5G4LIVES), Latvia & Italy
➤ Quantum Catalonia: A Public Fibre Network as a Real-World Testbed for Quantum-Secure Government Services, Spain
Category 2. Champions in addressing digital divide in rural and remote areas
➤ 5G Connect Danube Delta (5G-CDD), Romania
➤ Reaching 100% (R100) programme, UK (Scotland)
➤ National Broadband Plan (NBP), Ireland
Category 3. Cross-border and international connectivity
➤ 5G SEAGUL (5G Seamless Roaming for the Greece-Bulgaria Cross-Border Corridor), Greece & Bulgaria
➤ ASTEO VENUS – Iberian Resilient Digital Corridor: Lisbon–Madrid–Northern Spain, Portugal & Spain
➤ Balkan Digital Gateway: Neterra’s cross-border optical corridor – Danube river fibre crossings, Balkan Fiber Optic Ring (BFOR) and next-generation DWDM backbone, Bulgaria & Romania & Turkey & Greece & Germany
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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I cannot speak to any of the European entrants but if the R100 project is in the running for a Champion title the others must be pretty grim. This has to have been one of the worst managed, least successful, hardest to work with scheme of any which has been implemented in the UK. They could have acheived so much more and connected many more properties had they not been so difficult to work with.
16000 premises connected per year at a cost of what, £2700 per premise connected, of which only 6000 were connected by the smaller, independent providers. R100 may have worked if it was an openreach build but they were not interested in helping the smaller player.
Lets hope this award goes to someone more deserving.
Why are they wasting so much money connecting the hard to reach premises to FTTP when Starlink is available? £40 a month for 100mb..
Criminal waste of tax payers money.