The Scottish Government's economic and community development agency for remote a rural parts of northern Scotland, Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE), has finally launched a procurement (tender) process to find ISPs that will help it co-invest and deploy superfast broadband ISP services throughout the region.

The move comes eight long months after the governments Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office first granted HIE a slice of its £530m budget. Scotland's own national broadband strategy (here), which is admittedly somewhat vague, aims to make next generation broadband available to everybody by 2020.


Sadly HIE doesn't outline the scope of its plan, although it expects to be signing related contracts by July 2012 and states that the details will effectively be determined by whomever ends up agreeing to do the work. That all sounds rather poor when you consider the huge detail that has gone into the related Herefordshire and Gloucestershire plan (here).