Making Highland Broadband Happen

I've responded to the UK Government’s Digital Britain Consultation with detailed proposals on how Super Fast Broadband can be delivered to 100% of highland communities.

The UK Government proposes to use a 50p per month level on every landline to create a £1bn fund which will be used to leverage telecoms industry investment in superfast “Next Generation Access” broadband technology into areas where the market, left to itself, will not deliver.

Many rural areas of the Highlands lack decent broadband services and suffer badly in terms of economic, community and social development as a result. Left to itself, the telecoms market will not deliver to these communities.

There has been a lot of negative nonsense talked recently - much of it coming from the LibDems who really don't seem to understand the issue at all - about how there are no solutions to this, problem. But I think the government’s Digital Britain Strategy is a real opportunity. It will make substantial funds available to support investment in broadband infrastructure for rural communities. The question is how best to use it.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working with Peter Peacock MSP to develop our response. We’ve now put forward detailed proposal on how reliable, superfast broadband can be delivered to 100% of rural communities in the Highlands. In our proposals, we make clear that we need a regional solution to a regional problem, not the “one size fits all” solutions beloved of the big telcos. We argue that rural communities should be able to work “outside in” developing community-owned solutions which can then be joined into the national fibre network.

This approach has already been used to deliver high-quality broadband services in rural communities in the UK, such as at Alston Moor in Cumbria. Across the UK and Europe, there are now many examples of social enterprises, cooperative and community-owned schemes exploiting fibre and wireless technology to deliver high quality broadband services to rural communities. We must start to look in detail at how those models could be applied in the Highlands.

UK and European funding streams will soon be available. We need the UK and Scottish Governments to work together and with local communities to make sure they are used effectively.

This kind of investment in the future economy is what the Labour Party stands for and I’m determined to play my part in making that happen.