Broadband in the Highlands

I grabbed the opportunity to meet Stephen Timms MP on Monday, when he was in Scotland on a "research" visit in his role as Minister for Digital Britain. I caught up with him in Alloa and put the case for Broadband in the Highlands.

The Digital Economy Bill that Stephen is currently piloting through Westminster make a commitment to guarantee access to 2MB Broadband to every home in the UK. That won't do much for rural areas like the Highlands, however. Its still dependent on BT wires, so you will get a connection but if you live 15 miles up a strath the performance will be woeful. What we need is Next Generation Access - NGA - based on high speed optical fibre and wireless technology and offering speeds up to 100MB with assured service quality.

NGA could transform the rural economy.

The problem of course is that the telcos - BT, Virgin, Cable & Wireless etc - won't put the infrastructure into sparsely populated areas as there is not enough commercial return. Across the UK and northern Europe however, there are community-driven programmes springing up - based on mutual and social enterprise business models - which are finding ways to deliver NGA when government steps in with some seed funding to get the "backhaul" infrastructure installed

I think we really need to look at these models in the Highlands.

The Digital Economy Bill is proposing a 50p per month levy - just £6 per year - on every BT landline to go towards creating a £1bn fund to invest in just such infrastructure. What we need to do is make sure the Highlands get a fair share of that investment and that its directed to delivery models that make sense here. That will need communities, Highland Council, Holyrood and Westminster to work together. No mean feat!

Peter Peackock MSP has been doing great work on this, and I will support him from Westminster in due course.