Excerpt from pressandjournal.co.uk
The first minister promised households across rural Scoland will have access to 4,000 new superfast broadband connections by the end of June, after being told to apologise for “failures” of a flagship SNP programme.
The Reaching 100 (R100) programme was first announced by the SNP government in 2017 and was supposed to bring faster internet to 60,000 properties across northern Scotland by the end of 2021.
We exclusively revealed no homes in the Highlands have been connected to superfast broadband through the programme, while tens of thousands of others are still waiting for a vital connection.
So far only 109 properties have been connected, leaving 59,276 homes and businesses waiting to be hooked up to superfast broadband.
Meanwhile, the programme – which covers the Highlands, Moray, Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, the islands and Perthshire, – has been pushed back by six years to 2027.
Speaking at First Minister’s Questions on Thursday, Ms Sturgeon said 4,000 new connections will be made within the first six months of the year.
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