Digital Scotland – Reaching 100% Programme: public consultation report

5. Next Steps

The Scottish Government has used the information in this report to define the Intervention Area in order to submit an application for State Aid Approval to invest public funds into the deployment of NGA broadband infrastructure within Scotland.

The Scottish Government published an OJEU Notice marking the start of the formal procurement process on 14 ^th December 2017. The process required for the provision of NGA broadband infrastructure is expected to take around one year and the Scottish Government expects to have suppliers in place and ready to start building by early 2019.

Four bidders have been shortlisted for the detailed procurement phase, these are:

• Axione
• British Telecom
• Gigaclear
• SSE Telecom

The procurement will initially target the rural areas by removing from scope premises within settlements with a population of more than 125,000 people, namely Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow. This is to ensure that early investment is targeted at those areas of greatest need and to allow the market time to address urban areas. The procurement will also not target premises achieving speeds of greater than 24Mbps as these premises are likely to see an uplift in speed above 30Mbps as a result of supplier technology refresh. A number of further postcodes will not be in scope as a result of an ongoing extension to current NGA contracts.