Gigabit in Scotland: public review report - revision 2

2. Purpose of this Public Review Report

Under the UK Government’s Gigabit Infrastructure Subsidy Scheme^[3] guidelines, public sector intervention in broadband infrastructure investment is limited to those areas where there is no current or planned (within the next 3 years) commercial deployments, to avoid distorting what might otherwise be/become a competitive market.

The Scottish Government carried out an Open Market Review (OMR)^[4] of all current and planned infrastructure within the scope area between 21^st February 2022 and 21^st March 2022. The submitted data allowed us to produce a draft intervention area for the Public Review.

The Public Review is now complete and this report sets out the responses to the consultation and the actions that the Scottish Government has taken as a direct result of those responses and subsequent data changes from suppliers.

This report was originally published on 3^rd November 2023^[5] following the outcome of our Public Review. Further data submissions from infrastructure suppliers have been received and assessed as part of our regular rolling OMR update process, where suppliers provide coverage updates to the Scottish Government three times per year. As well as suppliers’ plans, the Scottish Government also accounts for updates from existing intervention programmes, including the R100 Programme and UK Government programmes. Submissions received by 19^th January 2024 will be taken account of ahead of the first planned interventions later this year. The updated outcome was published in a revised version of this report on 22^nd March 2024^[6]. This version of the report includes a further update to Section 5: Next Steps, with detail of the next planned procurement in Appendix E.