By Hamish Mackay
Splendid news that Openreach, which has a 3,200 workforce in Scotland, has outlined plans to build ultrafast, ultra-reliable full fibre broadband to at least more than 300,000 homes and businesses in Scotland – in some of the UK’s hardest-to-serve communities.
More than 160 exchange areas across Scotland will be upgraded, with the majority of homes and businesses in places such as Fort William, Oban, Turriff, Burntisland, North Berwick, Pitlochry, Carstairs and Stranraer set to benefit from what will be a massive nationwide five-year feat of civil engineering.
Island communities such as Brodick, Portree, Stornoway, Kirkwall and Lerwick are also included, with more than 60,000 households and businesses set to benefit across the Highlands and Islands, plus 30,000 in Aberdeenshire; 20,000 in Angus; 30,000 in Dumfries and Galloway; and 25,000 across Ayrshire.
The announcement expands on Openreach’s existing nationwide build plans, which already include hundreds of thousands more premises in 100 other Scottish cities, towns and villages. The company is also delivering the main build for the Scottish Government’s R100 programme. The company’s updated build plan follows an extended investment commitment by its parent, the BT Group – which means Openreach will now build full fibre technology for 25 million UK premises.
The plans also include an extension to the company’s biggest ever recruitment drive, with a further 1,000 new roles being created in 2021 on top of the 2,500 jobs announced in December 2020 – of which 275 were in Scotland.
The Scottish Government’s Economy Secretary, Kate Forbes, pictured right, said: ‘This is good news for Scotland. The rollout of ultrafast broadband to so many more rural communities is vitally important, especially as we focus on recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. Continued commercial build is an important part of the Reaching 100% Programme’s aim to provide access to superfast speeds for all premises. This focus on rural and hard-to-reach areas is exactly what I want to see and I look forward to hearing that these 300,000 addresses are connected.’
Robert Thorburn, Openreach Scotland’s strategic infrastructure director, said: ‘We’ll publish further location details and timescales on our website as detailed surveys and planning are completed and the build progresses.’
Openreach is already building full fibre faster, at lower cost and higher quality than anyone else in the UK, having made the technology available to more than 4.7 million homes and business so far. With download speeds of 1 Gbps, it’s up to 10 times faster than the average home broadband connection. That means faster game downloads, better quality video calls and higher resolution movie streaming.
Households can use multiple devices at once without experiencing slowdown – so more people can get online at once. Full fibre is also less affected by peak time congestion.
Openreach is using a range of innovations and techniques to deliver the build, whilst a major investment in its Scottish training centre in Livingston is helping to skill thousands of new engineers.
Recent research by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) highlighted the clear economic benefits of connecting the nation to full fibre – creating a £2 billion boost by enabling more people to enter the workforce.
This short video explains what full fibre technology is and you can find out more about the Fibre First programme, latest availability and local plans here.
Aerial picture by Sean Davenport of Myre Media
ends