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[Bowdon]

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2018/09/report-casts-doubt-over-scotlands-r100-superfast-broadband-plan.html

The Scottish Government’s future £600m R100 strategy has come under pressure after a new 2018 report from Audit Scotland, which works to ensure that public money in Scotland is spent correctly, warned that it “will be difficult” to deliver the stated ambition of 100% “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) coverage by 2021.

The good news is that the £400m+ Digital Scotland (DSSB) project with BT (Openreach), which has so far reached an additional 900,000 premises via a mix of Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) and a little Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology, is confirmed to have achieve its primary targets. “Without public-sector investment, only around two-thirds of premises in Scotland would have access,” said the report.

In other words, Audit Scotland confirms that at the end of 2017 some 95% of Scotland had gained access to a “fibre broadband” FTTC/P network (falling to 90% for those able to access superfast speeds of 24Mbps+). Since then we know that the current figure for “superfast” coverage has gone from 90% to around 93-94%.

Strong take-up also means that the programme is now expected to reach 60,300 more premises than originally planned, which means that the existing contract(s) will run until September 2019. The report adds that Openreach is “surpassing its contractual commitments to provide speeds of at least 24 Mb/s to 77 percent of premises in the contract areas” (the contract text is private, so this is hard for us to check).

The report includes a useful breakdown of how much money has actually been spent, which is something we haven’t seen since the last report in 2016. Audit Scotland states that by March 2018 the programme had resulted in some £259 million of public investment being paid to BT (£149m from the Scottish Government and £110m from the Highlands & Islands Enterprise); £27m less than originally planned.

At completion next year it’s forecast that the total expenditure under the existing Digital Scotland contracts will reach £442m. The reason for this is largely because BT also invested £126.1m of its own private money in the original contract and another £20m on a later extension, part of which helped to compensate for some incorrect modelling by the Scottish Government of EU funding.

2018 Audit Scotland Report

[Weaver]

Smelled a rat and now I have found it.

Key to this will be a superfast voucher scheme that will deliver a wide range of superfast technologies including fixed wireless, 4G mobile, superfast satellite as well as emerging technologies such as TV White Space. More details on the scheme will follow during 2019.

That isn’t even English. A voucher doesn’t deliver anything. Delivering means you have to build.

They missed out two words in that sentence - just before the word “this” there needs to be inserted “avoiding doing”.

So basically whenever they can’t be bothered they have a get-out clause saying "get satellite". We could do that right now, that is not ‘reaching’ anyone, by that definition we have all been ‘reached’ already.

So is this the deal ? there is no choice of ISP for rural users whenever ‘they’ decide that we do not have the right to the same free choice that urbanites take for granted.

There is no definition of what 30Mbps means: is that IP PDU downstream rate, sync speed or what. What about upstream? And what about all the other vital aspects of quality and service provision: addressing, protocols, censorship, reliability and maintenance. Some people are running businesses and have clue.