The £442m (public and private investment) Digital Scotland (DSSB) project, which has been working with BT (Openreach) to rollout “superfast broadband” to poorly served areas, is to extend Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) UK ISP technology to cover a further 6,000 premises thanks to a reinvestment of £17.8m.
At present the project has already helped to extend the availability of so-called “fibre broadband” (i.e. really a mix of mostly slower hybrid fibre FTTC and a little ultrafast full fibre FTTP) services to a total of 931,000 premises. The result of this is that approaching 95% of Scotland now has access to a “superfast broadband” speed of 24Mbps+ (NOTE: this is not an automatic upgrade, you have to order it from an ISP).
The contract also includes a clawback (gainshare) clause, which essentially means that any take-up by local premises above 20% in the intervention area should result in BTreturning some of the public investment (Scotland is now seeing well over 50%). The returned funding can then be reinvested into a further boost of network coverage and faster speeds, which appears to be where today’s £17.8m has come from.
In March 2017 over £15.6m was invested back into the programme thanks to a similar contract hand-back (here) and it’s possible that more could be released by BT in the future.
Michael Matheson, Cabinet Secretary for Connectivity, said:
“I am delighted that thanks to higher than expected uptake of services on infrastructure funded by the Digital Scotland Superfast Broadband programme, even more premises will now receive fast, reliable broadband.
The programme has not only delivered on time and on budget, but has exceeded its original aim of connecting 95% of Scotland to fibre broadband. More and more communities will now have the opportunity to benefit from investment in reliable and speedy broadband services.”
Robert Thorburn, Openreach Partnership Manager for Scotland, said:
“This extra funding, which we’re returning early, will help us deploy to another 6,000 of Scotland’s hardest-to-reach households. Full fibre broadband provides more reliable, resilient and future-proof connectivity. We’ll use it to reduce not-spots and improve some existing speeds.
We’re very proud of our strong track record of delivering fast broadband to rural Scotland and look forward to connecting even more communities.”
Until today the original DSSB contract was expected to run until the end of September 2019, although this extension means that it will now continue to deploy until sometime in 2020 (no specific completion date is mentioned).
At this point it’s worth noting that the funding appears to reflect an absolutely colossal subsidy of roughly £2,967 per premises, which helps to highlight the significant economic challenge of trying to push full fibre infrastructure into some of the most difficult to reach rural areas.
The above also highlights one of the biggest obstacles for Scotland’s proposed £600mReaching 100% (R100) project, which originally aspired to bring superfast broadband to every home in Scotland by the end of 2021 (March 2022 financial). Unfortunately the R100 scheme has been repeatedly delayed and is not now expected to award its contract until the end of this year (here), which casts that 2021 date into a lot of doubt.
