DSSB Rest of Scotland Gainshare Public Consultation

3. NGA mapping

This section provides a brief overview of NGA mapping for the purpose of informing responses to this State Aid public consultation. NGA maps for the Rest of Scotland project can be found at Annex A of this document.

The European Union State Aid rules are designed to ensure that any use of public funding ('State Aid') is targeted at areas of market failure and produces positive market outcomes while minimising any distortion to competition.

The State Aid rules require public interventions to be targeted so as to limit the risk of crowding-out or disincentivising existing and/or concrete planned private sector investments that would otherwise meet the desired policy objectives. In the context of broadband, the 2012 State Aid Decision permits the use of public funding only to extend broadband coverage in geographic areas where there is no provision of Superfast Broadband and it is unlikely to be developed in the near future (within the next three years).

The ' EU Guidelines for the application of State aid rules in relation to the rapid deployment of broadband networks' (2013/C 25/01) can be found at: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2013:025:0001:0026:EN:PDF.

The objective of the further investment is to provide access to NGA infrastructure which is capable of delivering access line speeds of at least 30Mbps.

The objective of this intervention is to target the reinvestment funding at areas that were designated as white NGA areas through the previous public consultation DSSB completed in March 2013 and where there have subsequently been no plans to deploy as part of the existing contract between the Scottish Government and BT. New postcodes created after this public consultation have been targeted for reinvestment funding.

These areas are identified as 'in scope' for gainshare funding on the map at Annex A to this document.

The DSSB Programme has changed its definition of NGA white areas from that used in its previous consultation of March 2013. In Annex A, areas with speeds below 30Mbps are identified as " NGA white areas", whereas they had previously only been identified as NGA white areas where they had speeds below 24Mbps.

Nevertheless, the area that is the target of this intervention is identified as NGA white under both approaches.