Broadband Reach going forward

Plans to bring broadband to businesses and consumers currently out of reach of high speed connections have taken another step forward.

For the Scottish Government have announced they are moving to the ‘request for proposals’ phase of the £3.5 million Broadband Reach initiative. A total of 20 companies submitted responses to the pre-qualification questionnaire. Eight have now been asked to provide comprehensive details by January 11, 2008.

The short-listed companies are:

    * Arqiva Ltd.
    * Astrium SAS
    * Avanti Communications Group plc
    * DSGi Business
    * Eutelsat S.A.
    * Remote Data Services Ltd.
    * TS Technology Services

One more company has asked not to be named at this stage.

It is hoped that a supplier will be selected by March 2008, with delivery of broadband services to currently out of reach customers from then onwards to December 2008.

The objective of Broadband Reach is to deliver an affordable, sustainable, broadband service to households and businesses which are currently unable to access a broadband service due to their distance from a broadband-enabled local exchange, and who have notified their demand.

If you still haven’t registered your demand with either HIE or the Scottish Government, there’s still time to do so but the deadline is January 18, 2008.

To be eligible for inclusion those registering must be a verified case of unfulfilled demand. In other words, you have placed an order for broadband but were unable to receive a connection due to line quality or the line length from the local exchange. Having a slow broadband connection doesn’t count.

Typically, those businesses and households out of reach are located around five miles or more from their local exchange. But this is a rough measure and line quality attributes are not fixed. The only way to know for sure is by placing a broadband order as this instigates a line quality check.

An estimated one per cent of all premises in Scotland are thought to be out of reach of exchange-based broadband. However, these premises are predominantly in the Highlands and Islands.

No guarantees are being made over end user pricing. All that is being said for now is that subscription fees should hopefully not be “significantly higher” than the typical market price for broadband.