Pupils help Digital Scotland celebrate reaching 940,000 premises
MORE than 940,000 homes and business across Scotland can now access fibre broadband through the Digital Scotland Superfast Broadband rollout, with deployment set to continue into 2020.
The partnership marked the latest milestone in the East Ayrshire village of New Cumnock. They were joined by pupils from New Cumnock Nursery School to unveil one of the latest fibre street cabinets that serves local homes.
The New Cumnock premises are among more than 24,700 homes and businesses across East Ayrshire that are now able to connect to the Digital Scotland network, in places like Cumnock, Galston, Drongan and Mauchline.
Local people can check the Digital Scotland website - scotlandsuperfast.com - to find out if they’re able to access the latest fibre broadband technology. People need to sign up with an internet service provider, as upgrades are not automatic.
Paul Wheelhouse MSP, Scottish Government Minister for Energy, Connectivity and the Islands, said: “It is another great milestone that the DSSB programme have achieved, reaching over 940,000 homes and business across Scotland.
“It is also fantastic news that the programme has been able to benefit residents and businesses in and around villages like New Cumnock – with deployment continuing across Scotland into 2020.”
Councillor Jim Roberts, Economy and Infrastructure Portfolio Holder for East Ayrshire Council, said: “As part of East Ayrshire Council’s Digital Week, it was great to be celebrating the availability of fibre broadband in the village. This is a real boost for residents and business in New Cumnock and the surrounding area.
"More and more of our villages have access to superfast broadband, which is vital if we’re to grow our rural economy - it can make a massive difference with everyone able to get online easily at the same time."
Fibre broadband offers fast and reliable broadband connections at speeds of up to 80Mbps1 and there are many suppliers in the marketplace to choose from. Whether you own a business, work from home or want to keep in touch with friends and family, fibre broadband enables multiple users to connect to the internet at high speeds and get better, faster access to online services.
Robert Thorburn, Partnership Director for Openreach in Scotland, said: “The Digital Scotland project and our hard-working engineers have delivered more coverage across the country at faster speeds than expected.
“The latest tally of 940,000 homes and business premises now able to connect to the fibre network through the DSSB project means we’ve reached around 100,000 more premises than originally planned.
“Connecting up rural Scotland is universally recognised as one of the hardest fibre builds in Europe. We’re proud of our track record, reaching thousands more homes than asked of us on time and under budget.”
Further information is available on Twitter @ScotSuperfast or Facebook at www.facebook.com/scotlandsuperfast.
ENDS
* These are the top wholesale speeds available over the Openreach fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) network to all service providers; speeds offered by service providers may vary.
Notes to editors:
Due to the current network topography and the economics of deployment, it is likely that not all premises within selected areas will be able to access fibre-based broadband at the same point in the roll-out. The Digital Scotland Superfast Broadband programme aims to provide fibre broadband infrastructure to parts of Scotland not included in commercial providers’ investment plans, and has reached around 95 per cent of premises when combined with current commercial roll-out plans.
Openreach Limited is the UK’s digital network business.
We’re more than 35,000 people, working in every community to connect homes, schools, shops, banks, hospitals, libraries, mobile phone masts, broadcasters, governments and businesses – large and small – to the world.
Our mission is to build the best possible network, with the highest quality service, making sure that everyone in the UK can be connected.
We work on behalf of more than 665 communications providers like BT, SKY, TalkTalk, Vodafone, and Zen, and our broadband network is the biggest in the UK, passing more than 31.8m premises.
Over the last decade we’ve invested more than £15 billion into our network and, at more than 190 million kilometres – it’s now long enough to wrap around the world 4,798 times.
Today we’re building an even faster, more reliable and future-proof broadband network which will be the UK’s digital platform for decades to come. We’re making progress towards our full fibre optic network target to reach 25 million premises by December 2026. Research shows a nationwide Full Fibre network could potentially provide a £59bn boost to UK productivity.
To help build the new fibre network and deliver better service across the country – we’ve created and filled more than 9,000 apprenticeship roles in the last two years and we’re recruiting another 1,000 trainee roles in Openreach in 2021. We’re also building greener – we operate the UK’s second largest commercial fleet and want to help lead the transition to electric vehicles, with a target to transition our fleet to being electric in 2030.
Openreach is a highly regulated, wholly owned, and independently governed unit of the BT Group. More than 90 per cent of our revenues come from services that are regulated by Ofcom and any company can access our products under equivalent prices, terms and conditions.
For the year ended 31 March 2021, we reported revenue of £5,244m.
For more information, visit www.openreach.co.uk
