As part of its “vow” to end a “digital exclusion plight” in Scotland, the UK government has announced it has signed a contract worth £157m with the UK’s leading broadband provider Openreach to make gigabit connectivity available to around 65,000 Scottish homes and businesses, including many in some of the most isolated areas of the UK.
The government said that it was backing the availability to gigabit-capable broadband to break down barriers to opportunity and to boost economic growth in digitally isolated communities across Scotland, where it said using the web was still “almost impossible” due to outdated infrastructure.
Locations within the catchment area of the upgrade include several remote islands off Scotland’s west coast, including premises across the Outer Hebrides – a chain of more than 100 islands, where currently just 7% of people can currently access gigabit broadband, among the lowest in the UK – as well as the isles of Skye, Islay and Tiree. Also covered in the deal are rural parts of the Highlands such as Applecross, an extremely remote peninsula; and Durness, the most north-westerly village on the UK mainland.
The £157m is with Openreach is the largest ever under the Project Gigabit scheme. The £5bn broadband deployment programme was introduced in 2021 with the aim of accelerating the UK’s recovery from Covid-19, boosting high-growth sectors such as tech and the creative industries, and levelling up the country, spreading wealth and creating jobs across the country.
On its launch, the scheme looked to prioritise areas with slow connections that were seen as being left behind in commercial broadband companies’ plans, giving communities in hard-to-reach places access to the fastest internet on the market, helping to grow the UK economy as a whole.
The agreement will see the UK government work alongside the Scottish government and Openreach to deliver the coverage. It forms part of deal struck under an £800m agreement with Openreach, announced in August 2024 as part of wider plans to end the plight of digital exclusion across rural Britain. Work is already under way to connect more than 227,000 premises in hard-to-reach parts of Wales and England as part of the agreement.
The contract will support significant work already being carried out through the Scottish government’s Reaching 100 (R100) programme. It also builds on a separate Project Gigabit contract in Scotland, awarded in February 2025 through a partnership with the Scottish government, for up to 11,000 premises in the Borders and Midlothian. More contracts are also expected to be signed later in 2025 for Orkney, Shetland and across the east of Scotland.
Commenting on what the ramifications of the new deployment could be and its potential benefits Yvonne Boles, senior site manager of Tayside Reserves at RSPB Scotland, said: “We fell between a few gaps in local network improvements, but now we have gigabit capable fibre to the RSPB Loch Leven visitor centre, which has been a game changer for us.
“The old internet was constantly going down or being very slow, which impacted our ability to work in the office as well as taking card payments in both the shop and the café. We wasted so much time on the phone to IT trying to fix things for us. It’s been such a relief and a benefit to have reliable, powerful internet.”
