The Scottish Government (SG) has launched a new Digital Connectivity website, which is now directly integrated into the main government website and appears to replace the old Digital Scotland (Superfast Scotland) site. The new site continues to cover the SG’s various broadband (e.g. R100), mobile, IoT and green data centre projects.
The new site hasn’t yet been able to integrate the old broadband availability checker (this still redirects you to the old site), but it does include some useful new details. For example, we particularly like the Data Insights page that displays much more detail – at a more localised level – on the progress of their Reaching 100% (R100) roll-out of gigabit broadband services via Openreach (BT).
The R100 scheme aims to reach over 110,000 premises – split across three contracts – in areas that lack access to “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) by March 2028. LOT 1 (North Scotland and the Highlands) is expected to cover 60,764 premises (100% via FTTP) by 2027/28, while LOT 2 (Central Scotland) will reach 32,216 (95.6% via FTTP and the rest FTTC) by 2023/24 and LOT 3 (Southern Scotland) targets 21,889 (100% via FTTP) by 2024/25.
According to the Data Insights page, the latest R100 data to September 2024 looks like this (more localised info. can be found at the link).
| Contract area | Total premises for delivery in the R100 contracts | R100 contract premises delivered | R100 SBVS (Voucher) premises delivered |
|---|---|---|---|
| Central | 30,322 | 22,152 | 1,164 |
| North | 60,764 | 17,629 | 2,798 |
| South | 21,889 | 20,614 | 593 |
| Total | 112,975 | 60,395 | 4,555 |