The Scottish Government has also launched a new online postcode checker – https://www.scotlandsuperfast.com, which is designed to give homes and businesses information on the superfast roll-out in their area, as well as providing information on voucher scheme eligibility.
Sadly for Weaver, and for anyone else here on Skye, the decision has been taken to dissolve North Skye Broadband Limited, a not-for-profit community benefit society that has been working since 2015 to bring a B4RN
(Broadband For the Rural North) style ultrafast 1 Gbps symmetrical FTTH service to the island. The biggest problem was that not a single penny of funding is available through the National Broadband Scheme 2016 for community schemes: it exists solely as a medium for transferring public sector cash to the private sector, and in rural communities such as exist here, a fragile business plan will always be wrecked by the profit element that telecoms companies demand.
Through a lot of very hard work, a "proof of concept" scheme was designed and planned for around 50 homes and businesses in the Uiginish area near Dunvegan until, a few days after a very successful "contractors' day" in January 2018 for specialised civil engineering companies took place, HIE casually informed us that the €200,000
de minimis funding that had previously been on offer had been withdrawn, due to the formal request for tenders for R100 being issued. We carried on, awaiting some real R100 progress with the hope of some synergy - after all, we had been stating since 2015 that FTTC was a completely inappropriate technology for sparse rural populations - but even after we sold off our IPv4 allocation from RIPE a year later to raise some cash because we had no money at all, the present impasse due to the legal challenge to R100 in the Highlands has continued to block any progress whatsoever.
By way of comparison, a superfast wireless scheme in the Outer Hebrides
("Connected Communities") was costing taxpayers
over £300,000 per year in payments to a private sector consultancy for management fees
just to keep it running. £146m was spent running sub-sea optical fibre from Dunvegan to Carnan (South Uist) but the maximum capacity available from Dunvegan Exchange for the 1 Gbps "proof of concept" was... 400 Mbps. No-one planned for any capacity to be available for local provision!
To add insult to injury, a 4G mast paid for by taxpayers has now been built by EE/BT right in the middle of our "proof of concept" area as infill for the much-delayed ECN that is well overdue to replace Airwave, which itself has been bleeding tens of millions of pounds of public sector cash since it was supposed to be switched off many years ago.
You just couldn't write this stuff, and I still have a 4 Mbps connection over long-obsolete ADSL Max, with no prospect of any improvement at all any time soon - and BT's USO request site says I'm not eligible because I can already have a 10+ Mbps connection
(no, I can't, I've been waiting over ten years for one, and will probably wait another ten, if I live that long!).