I NOTE your editorial on BT Openreach (“Broadband service must be improved”, The Herald, July 27). I believe that to suggest that BT has “starved” Openreach of investment is to ignore the facts.
Openreach has invested more than £10.5 billion over the past decade, when the UK was emerging from recession and rival companies invested little. This has made the UK a broadband leader among the major economies in Europe.
Investment at Openreach has risen by more than 30 per cent over the past two years and it will grow again this year. We have also committed to invest a further £6bn over the next three years in our fixed and mobile networks.
Our high-speed, fibre broadband network now reaches more than two million homes and businesses. Around 1.4 million premises have been included in BT’s commercial fibre rollout and 620,000 more have been reached through the Digital Scotland rollout with the public sector – a £410m project to which BT is contributing £126m on top of its commercial spend. Currently, around one in four households has moved to the faster services available.
Delivering fibre broadband across Scotland is the biggest challenge of its kind in the UK, arguably anywhere in Europe.
To date the Digital Scotland roll-out is on budget and ahead of schedule, reaching dozens of remote and rural communities from Sullom Voe in Shetland and Dores at Loch Ness to Tobermory in Argyll and Ettrickbridge in the Scottish Borders. By March 2018, it will reach 95 per cent of all Scottish premises. The Scottish Government intends to go even further, and we will do all we can to support that ambition.
Your editorial focuses solely on Ofcom’s comments on Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) but ignores the rapid rollout of Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) at speeds of up to 80Mbps.
This has provided more than 25 million UK homes with access to high-speed, reliable fibre broadband and helped to make the UK the leading digital economy in the G20.
Furthermore, BT has already announced plans to deliver ultrafast speeds to 12m premises by 2020, and to the majority of the UK within a decade.
Improving service is our number one priority, and we are making significant progress. Thousands of engineers have been recruited and we are fixing faults, speeding up appointments and installing new lines quicker than before.
We agree that the most important thing is ensuring as many of us as possible get access to broadband speeds that have the potential to make Scotland a more productive and successful place. We’re getting on with the job of delivering it.
Brendan Dick,
Director BT Scotland,
Alexander Graham Bell House, Edinburgh Park, Edinburgh.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel