Rural Scotland get superfast broadband funding boost
Rural Scotland looks set to benefit from a £9 million funding pool to help with the roll out of superfast broadband.
Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced the Scottish Rural Development Programme (SRDP) during a trip to a local cinema in Argyll and Bute last week. She said that the scheme will aim to provide some of the country's most hard to reach places with fast and reliable internet connections.
The SRDO is already up and running, allowing communities in remote parts of Scotland to apply for funding for their fibre broadband projects. This will enable the necessary superfast broadband infrastructure to be installed in places that have not otherwise been covered by commercial rollouts - often because they are not commercially viable due their remoteness.
Sturgeon said: "This SRDP funding will help communities in the hardest to reach broadband areas. This scheme takes the available funding for community broadband projects up to £16.5 million in Scotland, over and above the £400 million Digital Scotland Superfast Broadband (DSSB) investment.
"It is another step to achieving the Scottish government's aim of delivering world-class connectivity by 2020 and enabling people across Scotland to connect any time, any place, anywhere, using any device."
At present Scotland is lagging slightly behind the rest of Britain in the race to get all of its residents and businesses connected to superfast broadband.
The Digital Scotland superfast programme is currently aiming to reach 85 per cent of properties by the end of the year and 95 per cent before 2018, a year after the Superfast Britain initiative aims to have reached 95 per cent coverage for the whole of Britain.
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