THE BT Group expects its fibre-optic broadband to be available in the whole of Scotland by 2021 while by the end of this year 81 per cent of the country will be covered by its 4G mobile phone system.
According to BT chief executive Gavin Patterson the company is on track to have rolled out superfast broadband to 95 per cent of Scotland by the end of this year, with the remaining five per cent coming in the next four years.
He added that as “4G has come on quite dramatically in the last year” the company has made increasing mobile coverage a key priority.
“It used to be described as the percentage of the population that was covered by 4G but we are increasingly focusing on the percentage of geographic coverage,” he said.
“Population coverage is just below 98 per cent and geographic is 57 per cent. By the end of 2017 population coverage will be 99.5 per cent and geographic will be 80.9 per cent.”
Mr Patterson said this would be achieved by “putting together new business strategies across some of the most challenging geographies”.
Similarly, the final push on broadband will see the company having to come up with ways of laying fibre-optic cables in some of the remotest parts of Scotland.
“Some islands are extremely challenging, as are some remote parts of the mainland; it has really tested out engineering capabilities,” Mr Patterson said.
“In many parts of the mainland the rock is so hard we have had to find other ways of innovating to lay the cables. As we can’t dig to lay them deep in the ground we’ve used armour-plated cable and laid it along the side of the road.”
To date the company has invested £3.5 billion rolling out fibre-optic broadband across the UK, with the remaining five per cent expected to cost in the region of £400 million and £600m.
Mr Patterson said that while it is more expensive to bring broadband to remoter parts of the UK, the company will not pass that cost on to consumers, with the UK Government already providing £530m of funding and the Scottish Government also expected to make subsidies available.
“We made an offer to the UK Government that we will meet their objective of getting at least 10 megabits per second available to everyone by 2021 if we’ve got confidence that we can make a fair return on it,” he said.
“Looking across the whole of the UK it is very expensive and wouldn’t pass any commercial viability tests.
“In Scotland the government has a plan to get to 30 megabits per second using a government subsidy, which will be going through public procurement in the next year or so. We intend to play a role in that.
“The objective is that by 2021 everyone across Scotland and the UK is connected.”
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