Broadband in Borgue

The BT Openreach roll-out of fibre broadband to the Borgue area was completed in 2019 but unfortunately failed to reach some of the remoter parts of the Borgue parish. There are some alternatives for people who are still suffering from slow, copper wire-based broadband services.

The Scottish Government are now working on their “Reaching 100%” (R100) programme which hopes to deliver high-speed broadband to every property in Scotland. The original target date for this roll-out was the end of 2021 but it has been delayed. The Digital Scotland Superfast site allows you to enter your post code to check if your property is covered by the R100 scheme and when high-speed broadband will be delivered to your property. Properties in the Borgue area were showing an estimated date of ‘late 2022’ for installation of higher speed broadband but this has now been updated to ‘late 2023’.

There is a scheme, known as the Scottish Broadband Voucher to help pay for the cost of installing a faster broadband solution if you are not covered by the scope of the R100 initiative. Unfortunately, if you are within the scope of R100, you are not eligible for the vouchers and will have to find your own alternative broadband service as described below.

The first option is to use a service based on the 4G mobile phone network. This is available now from EE and BT and has been adopted by some properties in the Kirkandrews and Knockbrex areas. This can provide speeds of over 20 Mbps and is available from around £35 per month. An alternative to taking out a BT or EE contract is to purchase your own 4G modem/router and use a regular mobile phone SIM card to provide the Internet connection. A suitable modem/router would be the TPLink TL-MR6400 which you can buy for about £80. A 4G phone SIM contract with 200GB of data per month should cost around £23 per month.

A second option is to use a satellite broadband service. These range in price from £20 to £50 per month depending on the required speed and data volume. Satellite broadband can give high speed downloads but suffers from a longer time lag due to the distance to the satellites. This can render it unsuitable for interactive applications such as two-way voice or video communications.