A few pockets of the Shetland mainland are to benefit from much improved broadband speeds in the coming months – but the North Isles face a longer wait before moving into the modern digital era.
New cabinets are to be installed in areas including Gott, Weisdale, Sandness, Gulberwick, South Whiteness and Skeld as a joint project between Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) and BT’s Openreach draws to a close in the next 12 months.
But those in the North Isles and other remote islands are unlikely to see any improvement until the new R100 contract, which aims to provide superfast speeds of 30Mpbs to every home and business in Scotland by 2021.
HIE digital director Stuart Robertson said 9,500 premises in Shetland – around 75% – now had access to “superfast” speeds.
“Although our contract with BT has been running for some years, we still have some funding left over so the building in Shetland will continue through 2018 and probably into early 2019,” Robertson said.
He acknowledged there was huge frustration in the North Isles at enduring speeds which are hopelessly inadequate for modern life.
Shetland MSP Tavish Scott, who hosted the latest digital forum meeting at Islesburgh yesterday morning, welcomed the imminent improvements for some small areas “receiving pretty well no service at all at the moment”.
“The bigger issues are still our remote areas from Fair Isle all the way to the north of Unst, and those will be part of the R100 process, delivering broadband to 100 per cent of houses and businesses.”
Duncan Nisbet of the Scottish Government’s R100 programme said the last contract, worth around £275 million, had taken the proportion of premises in Scotland with superfast broadband from just over 60 per cent to just over 90 per cent.
The new contract will have funding of £600 million to reach the remaining nine per cent but “that last bit is going to be so expensive to address because it is the real hardest-to-reach, most remote places that we’ve got left”.
Nisbet said he would be “extremely disappointed if the initial procurement doesn’t deliver fibre” to communities such as Unst and Yell.