Scotland Reveals Next BT Fibre Broadband Rollout A
Post# of 17650
Posted Tuesday, July 15th, 2014 (1:18 pm) by Mark Jackson (Score 195)
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2014/07/...areas.html
The £410m Digital Scotland project, which aims to ensure that 85% of premises in Scotland can access BT’s “fibre broadband infrastructure” (FTTC/P) services by the end of 2015 (rising to around 95% by the end of 2017), has today announced the next batch of telephone exchange areas to benefit (representing 90,000 extra homes and businesses).
The latest update, which follows only a day after the Scottish Government announced additional funding for rural areas (£2.5m) and proposed plans to boost broadband coverage in the event of a vote favouring independence from the United Kingdom (here), reveals that so far the Digital Scotland scheme has helped to bring faster broadband to an additional 55,000 premises.
Digital Scotland’s Current Funding
The Highlands and Islands (£145.8m):
• £126.4m from public bodies
(Scottish Government, Department for Culture, Media and Sport [BDUK], Highland and Islands Enterprise and all seven local authorities that form part of the project area)
• £19.4m from BT.
The Rest of Scotland (£264m):
• £157 million from public sources
(Scottish Government, ERDF, Department for Culture, Media and Sport [BDUK], and all 27 local authorities that form part of the Rest of Scotland Project area)
• £106.7 from BT.
Once complete the scheme hopes to have helped more than 750,000 premises to get faster broadband, which will be in addition to the 1.4 million+ that should have already benefitted through BT’s separate £2.5bn commercial deployment across the United Kingdom (note: they passed the 1 million mark in April 2014 and recently hit a total of 1.2 million).
Meanwhile the next batch of upgrades consists of both new areas and plenty of infill (i.e. expanding coverage in communities that already have some FTTC or FTTP lines), although as usual these are tentative plans and subject to change. Unfortunately there aren’t any clear dates listed, although more info. can be found on the projects website.