 Felly, ydych chi'n gweithio. Felly, rydw i'n gweithio'r Gweithio'r Cymru i ddweud yn 2019, gan gymryd, os ydych chi'n gweithio'n gweithio i'r gweithio, fel y cynyddiad y gweithyddiaeth yn Fysbyddol? Felly, rydw i'n bwylliant i gyd-deni, ac yn gweithio'r gredigig yn enw i'r cyfnod yng Nghymru, ac mae'r gweithio'r gweithio yn y cyfnod. Felly, mae'r gweithio'r Gwyd-deni ein started at taking item four in private. This is to allow the committee to discuss its future work programme." Rhawer Masked has agreed that. We will move on to a gendered item. This is an evidence from of comment on its annual plan. It has connected nations 2021 Scotland report and other issues relating to Superfast broadband and mobile phone connectivity in Scotland. I would like to welcome the panel, I would particularly go and press on the director in Scotland. Scotland, Jonathan Roth, the Regulatory Affairs Manager, and Mansour Hanif, the Chief Technology Officer from OVCOM. Glyn, do you like to make a short opening statement of no more than three minutes? If you don't want to, we can go right into questions. I'm happy to do the three minutes if that's okay, convener. Absolutely. Thanks very much. Thanks for the opportunity to come and talk to the committee, as you said, about our annual plan and connected nation Scotland report. I was about to introduce my colleagues, but you've done that for me, so thank you. I'll briefly highlight to the committee some important aspects from both reports. The final version of the annual plan was published last week, and we have circulated it to the committee in advance. The Connected Nations report, which we published in December 18, shows that, while there's been some significant improvements in recent years, we're still concerned that too many people in rural areas of Scotland experience slow broadband speeds and poor geographic mobile coverage. We expect to publish an interim update to the data in the coming weeks. I'm very happy to share this latest data with the committee this morning. 92 per cent of premises in Scotland have superfast coverage, and that's with 66 per cent of rural areas covered. There is some incremental increase on the rural side. A mobile 41 per cent of Scotland's landmass has 4g geographic coverage from all four operators, but it is worth adding that this rises to 78 per cent from at least one operator, which I know has been of interest to the committee in the past. The annual plan sets out our priorities for the next financial year. It follows a public consultation on a draft plan, which closed on 8 February. We had events around the UK, including in our Edinburgh office, where we had around 40 people in attendance from across the sectors that Ofcom regulates. The event was facilitated by the Ofcom board member for Scotland, to provide direct feedback to the Ofcom board about how stakeholders in Scotland have told us that we should be delivering for citizens and consumers. It's worth saying in the annex to the plan that it sets out how we've taken into account the written and oral representations, including from the Scottish Government, likes of citizen advice Scotland, which academics. It covered things like opening up spectrum access and its allocation and price differentiation for broadband packages, among other things. The final plan also takes into account our statutory duties, developments in the markets that we regulate and our own strategic priorities. The main themes are similar to the ones that we discussed when we were in front of you February last year, so we still want to see better broadband and mobile services for all and we are looking to protect consumers from harmful pricing practices. We're also continuing to innovate our approach to regulation to see better outcomes for people and businesses in Scotland and across the rest of the UK. We shared with the committee the publication of our access report, which we may touch on later today as well, which happened in the last few days. I'm also very pleased to report some significant progress following our last appearance before the committee. During that session, Mr Lyle, for example, raised concerns about the cost of calling directory inquiry services. On Monday of this week, we introduced new rules to protect callers by capping 118 prices, and that will significantly cut the cost of many calls, bringing them back to 2012 levels. I commend Mr Lyle's press release on that to other committee members if they haven't seen it yet. As of 1 April, broadband and landline customers will automatically get money back from their providers when they experience delayed repairs, installations or missed engineer appointments. We've calculated the new scheme could see customers across the UK benefiting from around £142 million in payments. It's not disaggregated for Scotland, but we still think that number will be significant for Scotland. It's worth drawing the committee's intention also to our Boost Your Broadband campaign. It aims to help people identify the fixed broadband services available to them and get better value from their broadband deal. Despite superfast broadband being available to more than nine in 10 Scottish premises and momentum building behind full fibre broadband, our data shows that people are often not on the fastest service in their area. We recognise that there is a limited competition issue, and therefore consumer choice in certain parts of Scotland. However, we are encouraging people to check what broadband they need, what's available in their area and to speak to their provider or shop around where it's possible for them to do so to make sure that they're on the best deal. The Connected Nations and Annual Plan reports are obviously the main focus of today's evidence session, but I know from previous sessions that members will have a wide range of questions about connectivity, including in Scotland's rural and remote areas, and we're very happy to pick up any questions during this session. Thanks very much. Thank you, Glenn, for that. Has Richard Lyle got the first mention? It looks like he's getting the first question as well. Yes, good morning, gentlemen. Can I firstly thank you for resolving a problem that I raised with you last year? As you said, Off Common Monday announced a price cap on 1.18, arising from a request that this committee and myself made to you last year. Basically, on behalf of consumers, I thank you. For my next request, will Off Common assess the fairness of pricing differentials for consumers and how will this be linked back to contract status and length of tenure? Thank you for the question, Mr Lyle. As we've said in our annual plan, we have just launched a review into pricing practices in broadband services. We'll have a particular focus on vulnerable consumers. We'll have a look into the length of contracts that people are on, particularly people who have been on contracts for a long time and experience what's been called loyalty penalty as well. You'll be aware that that had been raised by Citizens Advice, which is a super-complaint with the CMA. What we'll specifically be looking at is end-of-contract notifications. That is both on fixed and on mobile services. That is designed to prompt people as they get to the end of their contract to shop around and look for the best deal that's available to them. That, as I said, will cover both the fixed and on-broad services and mobile. The idea behind that is that competition is good for increased choice, lower prices and for innovation. The idea there is that consumers, perhaps ones who have been less engaged with markets in the past, will then receive a yearly, as it comes to the end-of-contract, a prompt to have a look around for the best potential deal. We encourage people to approach their provider and ask for a discount as they approach the end, because we'll find that that is one of the best ways of getting a reduction in your monthly fee. Yes, when you're paying over and people need to shop around and people should be asking for a... I don't know what you hear people often nowadays asking for a discount, but they should do. I encourage off-com. I know that you have teeth. I know that you are using those teeth in order to ensure that you get a fair crack for consumers. My next question would be, at present, what level of competition exists in the physical infrastructure market and how concentrated is this in urban settings? How often are off-coms looking at incentive competition in rural locations, particularly in Scotland? Off-coms' goal is to encourage long-term significant investment in new networks, give consumers the choice to switch between those networks where, obviously, that's feasible, not in Glen's comments around the limited scope for competition in rural areas, and to allow the companies making those investments to get a fair return. What we will more likely see now is regulation varying by geography on those different levels of competition across Scotland that you mentioned. That takes three forms, so the first form would be competitive areas and the measures that we can put in place to support competing network build. We want to see companies, different providers building competing networks. We recognise, though, in Scotland that that isn't always going to be the case, so we have to look potentially at different, how we would support different commercial models there. In particular, the things that we would be doing where there's less competition or less prospects for competition is opening up open reach ducts and poles to allow other operators to get access to the existing infrastructure. We would also be encouraging a, well, we've allowed open reach, we're proposing, sorry, to allow open reach to recover the costs from rollout in uncompetitive areas by spreading the cost amongst consumers in a particular area, so that's similar to a regulated asset-based model. And we've also, in terms of mobile competition, where there's less prospects for that, we have consulted or proposing 74 per cent coverage obligation across our geographic landmass for Scotland. So that's just a couple of the measures that are put in place there where there's less prospects for competition in Scotland. On the PIA point in particular, as you might have seen last week, we launched a proposal to look at how we'll conduct market assessments in future by geography. So I think that that's really important, that's something that we haven't done in the past, and I think that that will bring benefits to consumers in Scotland where they might not have had being able to get the benefits from competition that you get in more densely populated parts of the UK. I'm going to bring Jamie in with a question, and it may then bring you in, Mansour, to help. Sorry, Jamie. Thank you, convener. And good morning panel. It's just falling on from the first-land questioning around consumer choice. Given that many packages, both broadband and mobile, are bundled together with other entertainment services these days, I wondered what work OFCOM is doing is to make it easier for consumers to switch between providers in the same way that other industries have seen a marked shift. For example, the way that OFGEM has done a lot of work in ensuring that customers can easily switch between providers. Are we seeing a shift in the amount of people who are switching providers in the telco sector, or is it still quite stagnant and people are finding it difficult to switch between one provider and another? Sorry, I don't have the date available at hand on the levels of switching, but perhaps you can provide that to the committee. Follow-up on that, but on your point about bundled services, OFCOM has, as you may be aware, a broadband speed code of practice. Within that, and I'm sure we'll touch on this later in the session, there's a provision there to allow customers to exit their contract without penalty if they're not getting the speeds that are being provided to them. I think that we've had hands recently to extend to cover all bundled services, because obviously one of the main obstacles to switching would be if there's an issue just with your broadband, but the other parts, your service, PTV, your landline telephone are unaffected. So that's just one small change that we've made on broadband. Sorry, I'll pick up on that. Sorry, that gets to the nibbler issue though. If you're, for example, with a provider who provides multiple services and you're unhappy with one element of that service, i.e. the television provision or the speed of your internet or the mobile aspect, but you don't want to switch because you may be perceived as losing those other services. How do you address that specific element of a package when you're in a contract which encompasses them all? What protections are there to ensure that the whole contract is on par? So within each of the, so OFCOM, not on PTV obviously, we don't regulate that in the same way that we do with fixed mobile and broadband services. Within that there's obviously, and we'll probably touch on this as the session goes on, different protections we have in place for each of those different aspects of the package, but you would have to look at them as a combined package. The protections that you have for specific elements of it, particularly on broadband, to the whole package. So if there's an issue with your broadband, then you're able to exit your contract for that specific reason. I'm not sure what you would do if your PTV service, you're happy with that, if you're happy with other aspects of it, I guess you would have to weigh that up in terms of competition with other offerings from other providers, but there are specific protections for each element of your bundled package there. There isn't anything that is such that covers it as a whole. Stuart, you want to come in with a quick question? Just on the narrow question of switching, if you split your packages across a number of suppliers, one of the things that happens is that you end up paying a line rental to each of the suppliers, despite the fact that the number of physical lines going into premise remains as one. Is that a proper way for companies to conduct themselves? Should it not simply be the prime contractor who's delivering the physical connection, who should be the only one making a line rental charge? I'm not sure if this is addressing your specific question, but on that point there around being one line, a lot of older people have just, for example, a fixed landline connection, and in the past they had been effectively subsidising consumers who were taking a broadband and a landline package. The price for just having a landline on its own wasn't much different to having a broadband and a landline that disproportionately impacted some older consumers who didn't, for whatever reason, feel the need to have a broadband connection. Last year we had proposed a cap effectively on landline-only services, so people who just had a landline service I think it was about five or seven pounds. Do forgive me, I think, what you're saying is interesting, but not addressing the point that I'm trying to make at all. My personal experience I had my broadband historically through Top Talk and I paid a line rental to them, but I had my voice connection via BT and I paid a line rental to them. When I swapped from Top Talk broadband to BT broadband I eliminated the line rental from Top Talk. Given that BT was always providing the physical connection, was it proper and fair that Top Talk would... I'm not picking out Top Talk for any particular reason. We're charging me a line rental and I know from constituents that that experience I personally had was far from being alone. People are being driven to buying packages that I did not wish to do. I'm not sure that I've seen lots of evidence of people paying for the landline twice effectively is what you're saying, but it'd be really helpful to pick this up in conversation afterwards if we could, because if it's an issue, we're very happy to do that. I think it might be helpful to pick that up, but it'd be also helpful to understand the problem, so once you've had a conversation perhaps you could alert the committee if you feel there's something that needs to be addressed. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. One of your key actions is moving towards universal availability of high-quality and secure communications network and designated universal service providers. How will you determine who will be designated a universal service provider? Is it something that companies will be incentivised for or will it be linked to licensing? Thank you. That falls to me again. As you might be aware, we've been consulting on two potential universal service providers. That's BT for the majority of the UK and KCOM in the whole region for historical reasons. KCOM is the main provider there. We've already identified or proposing that BT will be the universal service provider. We did have a consultation last year which was opening up to anyone who had an interest in becoming a universal service provider. We didn't get the level of interest that we were expecting and so we have the powers there to designate the universal service provider and that takes into account BT's market power and the reach of the network that they have and their historical position Has there been any issues that the industry has highlighted to you as any barriers for designating universal service providers? Part of the reason why companies might not have been interested in being a universal service provider is that there isn't cost-neutral to them so they are compensated for any costs that they incur deploying the network to areas where it might not always be economical but at the same time they also aren't allowed effectively to make a profit out of that so it's there might not have been a commercial case there for other operators or they might not see any benefit to them in doing that apart from maybe the reputational impact of being able to say they've delivered to these areas but essentially there isn't a commercial benefit to them in being the universal service provider and based on Ofcom's powers we have an ability to designate somebody's universal service provider if they meet certain criteria so in this case in BT they had significant market power Sorry, maybe you can answer this one as well How does that affect competition then in the market if you have a universal service provider? So there isn't the universal service providers there because there's a lack of competition in areas and because it's not economical to roll out so there isn't it seems more of a safety net I guess there isn't really there as the sort of driving competition that's not really what it was about it was providing a safety net for Manso did you want to ask me this for universal service broadband which is the minimum service of 10 megs which we feel is the absolute minimum that somebody should be getting and we already have universal service for voice which is surprise, surprise BT and Kcom the big blocker is just having the reach and the scale to be credible and being able to deliver this everywhere in the country and at the moment unfortunately that's very limited Stuart, do you want to just want confirmation that Kcom is the previous monopoly supplier in Hull who was therefore parallel to the old BT That's great Another key action you've got is aiming for universal mobile coverage and you said in your opening statement and I know that other people will pick up the 4G but we're still having massive problems in big areas, rural areas to just get in a mobile signal at all so aside from the plan statement on your spectrum based solutions for your rural mobile coverage what other technologies is offcom exploring I'm happy to take that Can I just clarify Don't worry about the button, the gentleman on your left will push up for you It will light up automatically so I think he'd lit it up and you'd turned yourself off but you're very much on now and in a good way So now it's a great question and this is really hard to solve and many people including myself and my old roles in BT&E we've been trying really hard to push out more coverage now the reality is it is improving but clearly not fast enough and demands are increasing so we do I think as a country we share the government's ambitions to have universal mobile coverage as well and the government has set a target of 95% geographical coverage which is a revolution in the way we measure coverage because before it we would only target coverage to where people actually live to houses so it's a really big challenge so we really believe it's a stepped approach where the first thing is to use the spectrum auction that we have currently ongoing as a first step to get as far as we can and we've set what we believe are reasonable targets that people can reach several operators, so two coverage obligations because the main thing is we need to have choice as well, it's no good just having one operator you need to have more than one so we think we can get to a certain amount of distance there and we'll see where we land with that that includes an obligation to build at least 500 masks each we're hoping quite a few of them will be in Scotland and need it very much and also covering partial not spots where you don't have good indoor coverage so that'll get us a certain amount of the way there I think we're very clear that we're not going to get to the 95% so the next thing we would do is seeing where the gap is between that and the full coverage because 95% geographical is pretty much it's equivalent everywhere a lot of those areas are national parks like Cairngorms a lot of those are mountains I just flew over them yesterday but it can be cracked but only through innovation so just to give you an example of two or three technologies where we could look at one is there's there's new technologies in 5G which allow for what we call beam forming so that's using higher frequency spectrum smaller antennas but putting more of them in together on a single box what that means is you can target coverage in a much more precise way what that means is that we could trial this out on the existing broadcast towers because in Scotland you've got lots of thousand feet towers for broadcast now operators today only install at 30 meters on those towers they do use them but they only put them at 30 meters on average because the existing the old technology meant that you need to choose the right antenna type and above 30 meters it gets really hard the new system allows it to be flexible so for every single user you can target the coverage and that's something totally revolutionary and we're pushing the government to trial that out later this year especially in Scotland where we could put it on the existing broadcast towers and see can we actually get much more efficiency that's one technology the other is there's a revolution going on in satellite low earth orbit satellite technologies there's at least two global consortia who are rolling out in the next few years we did have a look at this for the USO obligation but they weren't mature enough at the time we think in the next two to three years they will be mature enough to some extent whether they fly over Scotland or not is something that we'll need to keep a close eye on we hope they will but that would allow a direct from the these are at 500 kilometers rather than the tens of thousands of kilometers that the existing satellites are which means they can connect directly to mobile devices so the third area is device to device technology this is used today in the emergency services where the police can if they're out of coverage they can hop from one phone to another phone and back to the network so we think there's scope to do this in places like the national parks because the biggest issue in the national parks is that I don't think anybody really wants to build thousands of ugly towers in the national parks that is the challenge if we really want to get to universal coverage so if there's smarter ways of achieving that through innovation then it's something we should be looking at and the final thing is communities because the biggest issue with actually getting a model that gives return on investment is the cost of running that infrastructure and we think that if there are communities out there, especially in Scotland who think that they have a solution that they can use to lower the cost of running those networks and meeting a certain level of reliability then there's a lot of appetite from the operators to actually speak to them and we're proposing that we can facilitate those discussions today to try and get something that works for everybody Maureen, you want to come in Yes, I wonder where you are with national roaming I think it was alluded to in the recent 700 megahertz consultation I mean you say that it's your work is not about raising money but you know why can't you open up the spectrum to anybody and everybody accept lower receipts and therefore allow for higher coverage I'm happy to answer that I mean the issues I mean when you look at the Connected Nations update that we got we're currently reporting on where you have all four operators which is the worst case scenario and as I said we want to have the situation where you have choice so more than one but you don't necessarily need all four but the case excuse me we have coverage I'll switch it off so the can we switch that off sorry about that so what we don't want to do is discourage investment and it's the same thing with fiber so if you look at the all four operators you've got in particular this is a competitive environment you've got one operator who's pushing out and is slightly ahead you've got two other operators who are not that far behind and you've got one operator who simply has no interest in the rural areas so if you put in an obligation for mobile roaming you're disincentivising people to actually build the networks it's very similar to the case that we mentioned on fiber where we need to get a balance where there's incentivisation to actually build the networks and where that can't work then we should be open to forms of sharing or roaming etc. we've already had a look at this several times and we feel that an obligation on roaming would disincentivise investment in the rural areas in places like Scotland in particular so we think an obligation is in the right way we haven't excluded so we haven't excluded in the future depending if the coverage obligations that we're putting in and the other levers on innovation if they don't deliver in the medium term it's something we can always come back on but we think rather than that voluntary roaming is something that should be very much more invoked today because as I mentioned before it's not just roaming between operators but roaming between the operators and local community networks such as the fixed wireless networks that are run in many places in Scotland or community radio networks or community IoT networks we'd like to allow a better roaming there on a voluntary basis because we think it's in the interest of the operators and the local communities to actually provide an obligation which would actually disincentivise people to actually invest Mansur, you said about the emergency services network the contract was given to EE for that quite a while ago but I know that there are masks that have been put up that are still not live do you know when the whole system is due to go live? Yeah well we're very close to that it was one of my projects when I was in EE so there's masks going up every day so these things sometimes it takes a long time to do the groundwork and then you remove the blocker and they'll come up so the programme is a very complex one and I can't go into all the detail it's obviously managed by the home office but they are putting up masks around Scotland every single day I would make the distinction that it's the biggest mask build that we've had in the last 15 years a lot of the areas around the Highlands and Islands where there was a lack of road coverage in particular I know road coverage is a sensitive item but thanks to this scheme a lot of the roads are being covered because the main targets for emergency services are the roads I would make a distinction that there are some towers there's about the several hundred towers that EE is building as part of that but the most remote areas are a separate contract that the home office is building themselves and those are the ones that have been slightly delayed but they're also coming on air so when we looked at the coverage obligation we looked at the current status and whatever we felt was credible evidence of progress we took it into account but where it was still uncertain we couldn't take into account as we've got now the consultation responses back we'll have another look and see what is the real progress but I think the reassuring even though the overall programme launch has been delayed it's about two year delay I think and it's a staggered transition over three to four years and unfortunately Scotland was towards the end of that transition that's the overall programme for emergency services cos it's also linked to the core network that they're building as well but in the meantime the physical masks are coming on air all the time so there should be benefits so if you look at just the last four months we mentioned that there was a 3% geographical increase in just the last four months that's about two and a half thousand square kilometres in the last four months in Scotland alone so things are moving ahead it takes a bit of time before you actually feel it in your phones okay thank you the next question is from me and it relates to protecting consumers from harm there's a T-Best scheme which is in relation to assessing how businesses are capable of countering penetration to their systems you were to roll that out in early 2019 so could you just give the committee an update on how that's going please yeah I'm very happy to that's being run through my team it was something very new for us so the T-Best scheme for those who aren't aware it was modelled on the C-Best scheme which was run by the FCA in the banking sector and finance sector it was extremely successful and it's based around threat based intelligence penetration testing preventive of those banks and over the last three or four years it was very effective so the government decided to spread that across other sectors and T-Best is the telecom scheme for the T and they've asked us to take that scheme over so last year they ran two pilots that was DCMS running that pilot one was with a fixed operator and one was with a mobile operator so we participated in that but we weren't leading it we took the learnings and we've adapted it to our duties and obligations that we have currently under section 105 on resilience and we've adapted that scheme to the telecom sector and in January we took over that scheme and at the moment we are planning to apply that to all the large operators mobile and fixed and we have a scheme that's going to be kicking off now from March to April so the current status for the telecoms operators is that they've all received a very detailed questionnaire to allow us to build a visibility of their approach to security and resilience so that's ongoing now we should have the responses within a few weeks and we've actually had several of the large operators volunteering to go first in terms of the penetration testing because they take this, they do take it very seriously it's a difficult problem to solve 100% so we have a list of operators who will be starting the penetration testing sometime in the summer and it's going to run for about three to four months so it's a voluntary scheme and it will be out which means they will be paying for that testing which is a testament to the fact that they're volunteering means they see real value in that and I think it's a very positive thing because it's really important that security and resilience is taken seriously by everybody so that's moving ahead Is there some way consumers can know where the companies have been through this I mean is there a symbol or something that they can see automatically that this has been tested and the scheme is confident That's a very good question I don't think we've completely concluded on what we certainly haven't discussed having a badge or a certification I think it's a good idea that we'll look at we will certainly be communicating further to the public and to government on where we are on the scheme The one thing we'd be sensitive about is not giving the impression that because you've been through the scheme and you're immune so that's where I'll be very sensitive because the reality of security threats are that they're continual and there will never be 100% guarantee so that's the only thing I'll be sensitive about Glen, you certainly made Richard's Day on caching call charges and I'm not ashamed to say that again because I think it's good work as a result of the committee that I pushed you for last year was on nuisance calls and the whole issue of nuisance calls I don't believe that I've seen a drop-off in nuisance calls I still don't see any drop-off in nuisance calls who you can't trace and I still don't see any drop-off in nuisance contacts from companies who you've told them once, you've told them 10 times that you don't want their continued solicitations for businesses whether it be for smart meters which seems to be the one at the moment or anything else so is there any way you can tell us what you're doing on that and whether you're going to address it and make my day next year by coming back saying that you've solved it Glen Johnathan Perhaps I can take that one so nuisance calls remains a very important priority area for us we play an active role with the information commissioner's office of commerce responsibility to tackle this problem your point there around a reduction in nuisance calls there's actually been a 30% year on year decrease since 2015 of nuisance calls so apologies if you're not feeling that personally but I think there's information that we have to suggest that around 500 million calls have actually been blocked since then so there's obviously a lot of technical challenges behind that around how we block calls number spoofing since 1 October 2018 we've actually had the powers to remove phone numbers from people as well so I think that's a worthwhile addition to our toolkit for tackling this but although it's not explicitly mentioned in the plan we don't go into a lot of detail on nuisance calls in that it is picked up on going enforcement work and we do sort of refer to that as on going enforcement across a whole range of off comms work but it's to reassure you that although it's not specifically in the plan it remains a priority area and there has been a year on year reduction as I said as people move more from traditional telephony to IP based internet services it gets harder and harder to spoof numbers so we've also announced some work we're doing on blockchain which can allow us to actually better manage where numbers are allocated in the IP space and we put a lot of focus on the first thing we want to do with that is to help us stop nuisance calls which are coming from IP spoofing as well OK well hopefully next year I will see the decrease, not seen it yet it's Joe Thank you very much Camilla I want to address the geographic coverage you've just given us some updated numbers which have I wrote them down correctly 41% of our landmass is 4g and 78% at least 1 4g I'm not impressed by the latter figure because it means I would have to have multiple handsets depending where there was if I was able to exploit that you know having and I speak personally as someone who at home has precisely 0g not 2g, not 3g, not 4g outside the house far less inside the house so isn't it absolutely perverse that we're seeing the target for coverage being reduced at the present when in fact we should be seeing it increased OK sorry can I just check with those teams on which target is being reduced I think the offcom of reduced the target for geographic coverage in Scotland 64% I just have to say to you that is utterly perverse I mean I would say that we should have no improvements in telephony services in cities of any kind including 5g until we get decent rural coverage now I'm an extremist on that but I'm not alone in that so why are offcom reducing the target precisely at a point where we should be seeing renewed an additional effort in rural areas for coverage so I don't think you're alone on that I think everyone round here would agree that more needs to be done to improve rural coverage the 74% target that we've proposed for Scotland I think it's worth really reinforcing the point that this is the largest increase out of any of the UK nations so Scotland is coming from a much lower starting point I think the average 4g coverage is around 50% of landmass that's a huge increase take the point it's still lags behind the rest of the UK but I guess these things have got to be done in steps so that's the largest increase out of any of the UK nations the vast man's you're touched on earlier about the value of the spectrum the vast majority of the value of the spectrum auction is going to be in Scotland so I think that's a really important point to make firstly the reason why the coverage target for Scotland does in comparison to the rest of the UK nations is because we have to weigh up the costs for the operators in deploying this and the benefits and there is a real risk that if we don't get the balance right on setting that coverage target there's a real risk that the spectrum obligation would go unsold now that would be a big problem for everyone across the UK as well so there's a balance there for off-common we've got a duty to ensure the optimal use of spectrum so there's a tension there between balancing the costs of deploying networks in these areas and I think man's you're touched on it as well for Scotland to get up to the equivalent of the target for the UK there would need to be somewhere in the region about an extra 300 masts that are built just to get up to that target that's for the rest of the UK and there's no escaping the fact obviously that in these areas the commercial case for deploying is not as strong and that's partly because obviously the challenging terrain and the fact that it's just simply less densely populated is in other areas but that's not to say that we shouldn't be trying to achieve as wide geographic coverage as possible and so as I said it's the largest increase out of the UK nations but I do take a point. Yes but if we had the roaming the 41% would automatically go at 78% so you could get a 37% uplift now Mansour said commercially you can't do it and that is utter nonsense and I'll give you an example of why it's nonsense when banks started to join their ATM networks to get that one of the things they did when they were using the banks we networks we get huge benefit in getting access to the big network there's an interchange fee and in other words if a customer of Bank A uses an ATM at Bank B, Bank B gets paid by Bank A so therefore and by the way what happened over about 10 years was the small networks grew so that you got more or less balance of the amount of money we went between the banks if you did the same in networking in telephony where a tiny mobile operator had to pay but had a legal obligation so I just don't... I think we're viewing this as a technology problem and it is also a business problem and I just don't accept what I heard about the arguments against network roaming and as I say the incentive in Scotland there's immense you could get it from 41% to 78% and my phone on whatever network operator was using simply by changing the business rules I also want to hear about the unused but licensed spectrum I spoke to Nominet and I know they have views on this and I've responded sorry I'm having a rant I wasn't going to suggest that but could we let Mansour perhaps answer the first part of that question about... So maybe I take your point clear enough I'm not saying that there isn't commercial solutions to the type that you mentioned now the problem is they cost the overheads of those in the telecoms so big that the scale that's shown in those areas is not that relevant but that's not the main point I was saying the main point I was saying is there is one operator in the UK who said national room is a great idea why don't we do it that operator is the one that's dragging their feet is causing everybody to be at 40% or 50% because they couldn't care less and rule so they know full well that the actual compensation if you apply an obligation where the operator has put in hundreds of millions of pounds to lead on the rule side because they believe it's something that needs to be done for their strategy and the other two who are not far behind so if you just compensate them with an obligation where they will never recover their costs then you're getting a result because basically the operator is not investing will get an easy ride so when we say that we think that roaming could be a good solution provided it's based on a voluntary it means what is the right commercial deal that actually can compensate and still incentivise companies to invest in Scotland and still get that because that's where we are and I think there are new technologies coming out that can do that so that's where I was saying basically there's one company that's dragging their feet they're happy to do national roaming because they don't want to invest if there's a way that the companies that are investing can be suitably compensated for doing it for allowing the other ones to roam then that's something we should absolutely encourage and we will encourage if there's a voluntary scheme that can do that the other point is very linked to that which is the spectrum sharing the use of spectrum that's not out there there's a fantasy that it's spectrum that's the issue but the reality is in the area where you have unfortunately you have no coverage there's nobody using the spectrum there because there's no coverage so national roaming wouldn't help you anyway because there's nobody there to roam on but nobody's using the spectrum either so the reality is if you were to get together with your friends and build your own network you might be doing a fixed wireless network you might be doing a local community network and if you can show that you can actually have local resources and teams who can help to actually lower the cost of monitoring and providing a quality of service I'm 100% sure 100% sure that at least one, maybe two maybe all the operators would say we have no issue in letting you use our spectrum and we will put in place that scheme that you mentioned in the banks to allow our customers to roam back and forth because that's the only one Are you saying therefore the commercial operators have the veto over communities being milked to do that in areas where there's white space on the ground? No, if you want to use TV white space or any other spectrum that's not their licensed spectrum you can do that. Today up till now there has been no agreement because people have been just saying give us the operator's spectrum and we'll do it ourselves that's not a way of getting without any kind of agreement on roaming is not going to get very far what we see now is the operators understand that they're not offering the right service to people like you as they should do they got that now we've made that a big headache for them and I used to have that headache when I was working for the operators that's understood now the problem is how do you get a point where it becomes constructed to everybody now I've been approached by many fixed wireless operators who are small family companies sometimes community radio companies community IOT companies many in Scotland, the smart rule for example in Scotland who are really good at what they do is ask them is can you actually get the operating cost down to a reasonable level which is attractive and if you can do it better than the operators we will be the facilitator and we will make sure the operators understand the opportunity and then they are ready to give their spectrum whatever spectrum is needed to those operators and then put in place the necessary roaming agreements and if they do that we will take that percentage of coverage and get their coverage obligations because that's a win-win for everybody so that's something that we think has got a lot of legs now but it's about everybody putting their best resource together okay thank you I think we'll move on to the next question which is Colin I suppose sticking with the subject of inferior services in rural area but can I turn to Broadband in your opening comments you updated the committee that Superfast Broadband covered in Scotland was 92% it was just 66% and that compares to the rest of the UK, we're in rural areas at 74% do you accept there is a real digital divide in that rural areas are quite frankly being discriminated against and when do you estimate that all premises in Scotland will have access to decent broadband so thank you for the question yes I think everybody around the table and we acknowledge that in the Connected Nations Scotland report as well that there has in the past there still is a digital divide between urban and rural areas that gap is closing we've seen some significant improvements in coverage across Scotland in terms of question about when will we see improvements there's a number of things we would point to that are happening just now so firstly there's the Ofcom's implementing the UK Government's universal service obligation we expect from late 2019 early 2020 people will be able to request the universal service obligation as Mansur said that was 10 megabits per second download speed with 1 megabit per second upload speed so that is the minimum that Ofcom considers that people need to be able to do the full range of activities such as streaming online shopping gaming online as well in parallel to that in parallel to us progressing our us responsibilities obviously the Scottish Government has its own reaching 100 per cent programme as well the aim there is to bring 100 per cent sorry 30 megwits per second speed 200 per cent of premises so there's two immediate programmes that are happening there that we would expect to see improvements in rural areas as Mr Lyle touched on earlier we just last week set out proposals for as I said for looking at how we assess competition and therefore the remedies we put in place based on geography so there's a recognition I think there's competitive areas a large number of a large part of Scotland won't fall into that category there's areas where we might have to support alternative models such as single or shared networks and there's a third category of areas where there's just simply isn't any commercial case for people to roll out broadband and there's no prospects for that happening anytime soon so what we're doing there is supporting public policy makers in helping them I guess providing technical regulatory advice on the programmes that they would they're looking to roll out but I guess there does come a point where you reach the limits of what regulation can do and then there's a case for public intervention whether that be from the UK Government or the Scottish Government or other public policy makers and of course role there is to support them provide technical and regulatory advice and data to ensure that for example our USO scheme and the Scottish Government scheme that we want to see smooth interaction between them as possible we don't have a formal role I think it's worth just reminding the committee of that on R100 but we're looking at ways in how these two schemes can link up together to deliver those improvements for people in rural areas that you mentioned You don't have a formal role on R100 but do you have a view that R100 should start with rural areas instead of simply allowing urban areas to have that competitive advantage all the time that R100 should focus heavily on that outside in approach to make sure that rural areas do not continue to have that competitive disadvantage with all the impact that it has I think that the Scottish Government in their most recent publications on this they have said that the focus is on rural areas first so a lot of the urban centres in Scotland so the main city urban areas they have been taken out of scope of R100 because they believe that the commercial investment and the things that OFCOM is doing and just the normal deployment from the operators that will address the urban areas have said that the priority and the immediate focus is on rural areas and I believe about £383 million of the total £600 million has been allocated to the Highlands and Islands region and then another significant chunk of that money is to the border of South Scotland so I think that they have identified that as their priority I know that colleagues will have questions about R100 so can I just focus on the work that you have said that OFCOM are carrying out what would you say is a good result then at the end of 2019 bearing in mind about 66% of rural Scotland getting coverage of superfast broadband at the moment what is a good result at the end of 2019 based on that work that you say OFCOM are doing so I guess it depends what speed we are looking at so for the USO criteria of 10 megabits per second in one down 4% of Scotland that's still too much but there's 4% of Scotland that don't meet that criteria yet so hopefully the universal service would address those issues I do take the point that a number of the premises in Scotland might exceed the USO cost threshold which is £3,400 for the network to come be deployed to your premise so what we have we've taken that feedback on board and what we're proposing it's called demand aggregation so if one person in a community calls up and says I want to exercise my right to request the USO there's an automatic presumption that 70% of the premises in that area would also want to take it up so the idea behind that is it speeds up the deployment so we'll be in a better position by the end of 2019 when the USO takes effect and there is a yet and so we would expect operators to be majority of cases in the roll out of USO to be within 12 months I think it's just worth pointing out the timing to your question about what can we expect by the end of 2019 I think the progress we've seen in the last 3 to 4 months that we've just updated you on that's likely to continue between now and the end of 2019 so what can move the dial on that are the programmes that we just mentioned so the USO from our side that we're in charge of implementing the R100 from the Scottish Government the outside in fibre programme from the UK Government all of those schemes are just ramping up and to be very specific on the USO by the end of this year it's only going to be kicking off and then people can start ordering it we hope by the end of this year, beginning of next year and then there's a 12 month timeline for people to actually be delivered so those are the things from that next year those programmes coming in that can really move the dial beyond that this year is going to be a steady progression but not but the figures you gave at the start were for superfast broadband so we're talking about speeds of 30 and you said it was 92% across the whole of Scotland and the figures in your report show 66% in rural Scotland so that's speeds of 30 so what come the end of 2019 do you expect that coverage to be in rural Scotland at 66% at the end of 2018 what will it be at the end of 2019 as I said the same kind of incremental progression as we've seen over the last 3 months because there's nothing this year which is going to move the dial more than that current progression it's hard to put a number on what increase you'll see from 66% there is an additional point that's worth making which is there's still legacy investment from some of the existing schemes happening too so digital Scotland's superfast broadband and the BDUK scheme and the gain share that came from that is still being invested back in it so that will contribute to the small increments that Mansour mentions but it isn't until 2019-2020 when you're going to see so an R100 beginning to come in that you might see that dial being shifted faster and the other final point which you mentioned earlier is that area 3 in terms of geographic economics of network rollout covers most of Scotland so what we're consulting on is effectively a new investment model to encourage open reach to invest in those areas in a way which is very difficult today and where it's unlikely to have other investment so the areas that are not going to be covered by other government or Scottish government schemes will be addressed through that as well and we're also consulting on allowing access to dark fibre to allow more greater competition on a single if there's only going to be one single infrastructure we need to allow access to as many players as possible all of those are again going to shift a dial considerably but again that scheme is only going to be implemented from the next round from 2021 I was just having a quick look at the Connections Scotland reports so there was 87% superfast coverage in December 2017 and that's progressed to 92 over the course of the year so I'd imagine you could see similar incremental improvements and before that it was hovering around 75% so just to give you a sense of how it moves on each year Colin, just before we move on Jonathan, I'm not sure I picked it up but it will probably come up just about delivery of our 100 so I'm going to bring Maureen in and you want to ask about that and if you want to come back on something John Colin, I'll bring to you Maureen Does Ofcom have a target for full fibre coverage in Scotland by the end of 2019 and you know how quickly, you say there's all this roll out going on, how quickly do you see the coverage really increasing, stepping up a pace over the coming years and to an extent that you see Scotland matching the rest of the UK because we've still got this lag between Scotland and the rest of the UK Can I just check with that in particular around full fibre full fibre so offcom doesn't have a target for full fibre the UK Government has in its future telecoms infrastructure review I can't remember the exact number 15 million lines by 2025 sorry I think the Government target in the FTI is 15 million by 2025 and then pretty much all of the country by 2032 I think that's full fibre which is defined as 300 megan above which is beyond the superfast and everything else we discussed and so at the moment Scotland is 4 per cent full fibre coverage in the rest of the UK I believe it's not much it's about 6 per cent so we don't have a target for full fibre obviously we want to see that move forward as much as possible and just to go back to the document that was published last week which was entitled well it's all about encouraging full fibre investment and so obviously the commercial case isn't always there for operators in rural areas so again just to go back to the sort of safeguards that we're putting in there it's allowing open reach well to ensure that open reach has the still incentivised to invest in full fibre we're going to be allowing it to spread the cost of that deployment amongst its customer base so we've got a real focus on the future of full fibre because obviously the UK does lag behind some other European countries in that respect so the proposals that we put out last week are all designed to ensure that if it's not open reach that there's other providers investing in full fibre you've got a range of possibilities from the USO which is the minimum to the full fibre which is the maximum and you have in between the superfast and everything else so from the schemes that we mentioned USO is not going to deliver full fibre the R100 is aiming for 30 meg which is not full fibre and the government scheme that is looking at the full fibre is the outside in UK government scheme which is just about kicking off now where they were pushing from UK broadband UK they were pushing on the 30 meg and I think what they've decided is that the final fibre 6% rather than keep pushing on the 30 meg they should make a focus on full fibre from the outside in and I think that's a really interesting a very difficult approach so that might actually start delivering some it's quite ambitious but that will add to it and then as Johnny pointed out from our side we're focusing on that area 3 looking at the economics of full fibre investment in the rural areas to make sure the rural areas are not left behind as fibre goes to the rest of the country but do you not see your role as being the pusher the incentiviser to get private companies because they're not going to do it unless there's some sort of push that's exactly what we've set out in this document that's where we expect to see some competition we're allowing pricing flexibility so that operators can compete with each other in the areas where there will be competitions or there's an expectation there will be people building competing full fibre networks but obviously as Mansur said that final third of the UK where there isn't that commercial case that's exactly what we've set out to drive that investment to ensure that we don't have a situation where you'll divide that's opened up over superfast over the years this is all about now the forward-looking agenda for this and that's exactly what we're doing we're trying to drive that investment wherever we think there's anybody who's likely to build their own fibre we want to encourage that and support it reduce the cost, reduce the bureaucracy and remove the blockers and if by doing that they need access to ducts and poles that are currently owned by BT so that's our focus in the areas where we think people can invest and are ready to invest we're working on the whole system where open reach is an incentive to invest themselves but opening up the assets so it's easier for other people to build new physical infrastructure then there's the area 3 where we think that even with all of that we don't see any appetite for anybody to actually invest because the costs are quite challenging to continue to invest in fibre there and also then opening up the open reach infrastructure to as many players as possible who might use their fibre or put retail offerings on their wholesale offers and just before we move off on this I know there are other providers apart from BT that have fibre connections across Scotland probably the best one are power lines and SAC have a fibre connector across all of the things I've asked them why they don't utilise that and they say because they can't get a licence to utilise it would you consider licencing people like SAC who have got fibre broadband and have they approached you because they've told me that they can't get a licence I think you're talking about code powers here in terms of licence so in this case what's really interesting is we changed the electronic communications code to encourage more players in this field and since we did that last year we've seen a huge rush of applications for code powers and nearly every week we're publishing consultations on attributing code powers now I'm not up to speed on whether SAC have asked for that but we can check for you if you want I think it's certainly interesting in rural areas often we do have pylon lines with broadband connectors all well on the top fit and it might make those remote houses more easy to connect I can think of huge amounts across the highlands but they're telling me that they just meet nothing but problems perhaps you could clarify that I'm not entirely sure from whom they meet problems but it is worth saying that there is a scheme called the access to infrastructure regulations which explicitly allows telecoms providers to be able to use other infrastructure particularly gas and electricity so we've had a conversation with the connectivity minister and OFGEM a few weeks ago about this and we're going to be doing a date still to be confirmed a round table with providers, with OFGEM with ourselves and with the minister to have a conversation about access to infrastructure the most two important things to say about it one is it wasn't a system designed for large scale infrastructure or network build and secondly, OFGEM has a formal function for resolving any disputes between commercial operators in terms of access to infrastructure so if they are not able to agree commercial terms then they can come to OFGEM and say we can't do that, we need you to arbitrate and do that for us so it is a space we're active in and we would expect the gas and electricity providers to be coming to the session in the next few weeks I think probably and I understand the point and I think the very point that has been raised at this committee might prompt one or two of those people with fibre optic cables to actually start thinking about how to use them and we are quite pushed for time there are a lot of questions so I'm going to part that one there and thank you for that and maybe take it up with you later Jamie, the next question is yours at broadband rollout in Scotland specifically looking at the reaching 100 programme can I ask Ofcom what is your understanding of how many premises at the moment have access to superfast broadband commercial or residential as defined by the 30 meg target so on the connected nations group many premises 92% of premises 92% and do you have any understanding as to whether the reaching 100 project will be reached in terms of dates because there seems to be a little bit of confusion as to the definition of what by 2021 means that could easily be December 2020 could be the end of 2021 or indeed as one media report could be financial year 2021 which means March 2022 what is your understanding of when that target may be reached so obviously as I said we don't have any formal role in that so we are not party to the procurement discussions as we shouldn't be so we have to work on the basis of what we understand to be the connectivity minister said contracts would be awarded in 2019 they still have the target of 2021 but our focus has been on aligning the USO and the R100 programmes and our focus then is the start of 2020 when the USO kicks in so provided that we have the mechanisms in place then to allow these two schemes to interact smoothly sharing data is going to be really important the R100 contractors or contractor whoever they may be and the USO provider there will have to be an exchange of information between the two to ensure that there's no overlap in terms of the roll out and the people are within the correct timescales but as to the actual date that wouldn't impact or affect our engagement with them on the USO which takes effect from start of 2020 OK, so my reading of your answer is therefore your engagement or your focus is on responsibility on the USO and not on R100 therefore the information that you get around R100 is a courtesy given to you by the Scottish Government and its director as opposed to having any formal roll in the roll out of that programme is that correct? I wouldn't quite put it in those terms so we have discussions with them to get updates on progress given that it's in procurement phase as you'd expect obviously it's limited what can be said publicly about that and with us as well so as I said, our focus has been on ensuring that the consumers who exceed the USO cost threshold and might not be immediately picked up through the first phase of R100 to ensure that they aren't left out so there's scope there for us to look at how we can line up the two schemes and that isn't dependent on the end timescale for completion We do also provide technical advice on requests to the Scottish Government and to all these schemes if they ask for technical advice about what's the best way to configure infrastructure etc we're happy to provide that I think that that's an interesting point is this interaction between the two governmental schemes can you just explain to me clearly that this last 8% is going to be the hardest to reach and there's a reason why it's the last 8% from a geographic point of view from a technical point of view so inevitably there's some challenges there in ensuring that 100% of all premises are covered but can you explain to me and this is something we've touched on previously but never quite got to the bottom of is the interaction between the universal service obligation that it will exist for 10 meg in 100% of Scotland and a R100 scheme for 30 meg also in 100% of Scotland and if there is a separate contract or a single provider who is responsible for both or two providers working alongside what that interaction will be is public money being spent twice or are the two schemes complementing each other and I'm never quite sure we got to the bottom of that so it's a very good question so it's worth saying that the universal service obligation or your right to request that won't apply to you if you are due to receive deployment or if there's another publicly funded scheme that has given a firm commitment that it will be coming to your premise within 12 months so that is designed to address the point of duplication of effort and sort of public and it's worth saying obviously that the USO isn't publicly funded so it's funded through industry so there isn't as such UK taxpayers money going into this in the same way that there is with our 100 programme I'm sure that James is going to ask you this but the question therefore is if our 100 is to be rolled out and we don't have a date for when it's going to be rolled out and at the end of this year if we don't have broadband that we want the universal service obligation of the 10 megabits that it could be said well you're getting our 100 by 2021 therefore we don't need to supply it for you is that what you're saying or if I just understood that No no no so as I said it has to be a firm commitment so the our 100 contractor or contractors would have to share with the USO provider and that is why I mentioned earlier about the date of sharing being so important so we have a clear roll out plan we are coming to this premise within 12 months therefore your USO doesn't apply and what happens to I mean the poor consumer sorry Jamie I'm standing on your question but what happens to the poor consumer at the end when that neither of the dates are reached and he doesn't get it on time or she doesn't get it on time the our 100 or USO well if it's told you getting our 100 so that it missed out on the USO what happens to the consumer so that they're in a better position than they would have been because at least they can request the USO and it's worth saying that because of the technology you're not going to get just a bang on 10 megwits per second in many cases it could be more than that you could end up actually with a super fast connection therefore taking you out of the scope of our 100 but if our 100 contractors hadn't if they weren't coming to your premise by that date anyway you still wouldn't have the option of being able to request the USO so this is at least something that people can look to in the interim while they're waiting for the our 100 so the first thing is as we said upfront clear plans to be shared and I think that's fully understood by the our 100 people and by the USO people ideally we'd like this to be into a single provisioning tool software that the USO provider can see directly the updates from the our 100 program now to your point it's a very good point the detail of what happens if they had a strong plan to deliver our 100 to a customer therefore that customer is not eligible for USO our aim and we need to work through the detail of this as we go into implementation our aim would be to flag that this person was delivered was due to be delivered on our 100 and our expectation would be that we would get regular updates from the our 100 suppliers and where they are and if they do reach a blocker at any stage we could have the option to reactivate the USO at that stage and accelerate where possible that would be our ambition to do that but we need to work through the detail at the moment okay, Jamie, I apologise for standing on your question you raised a very interesting point and I won't duplicate that but I will follow on from a consumer's point clearly 30 meg is better than 10 there's no dispute about that but if you're currently getting speeds of one or two then 10 is better than nothing so the problem I have though is that if you are premised now a business or a consumer residential consumer and the end of 2021 or perhaps beginning of 2022 seems far away you won't know the date currently of when our 100 is coming to you because the contracts have not been awarded yet so in that instance could the request the 10 meg USO in the interim and how achievable would that be given that if one single household in the middle of nowhere says I have no idea when our 100 is coming to me could be two and a half years away but I want a better service and now under USO who is obliged to provide that service and will it be achievable? So the consumer wouldn't there wouldn't be an expectation that the consumer would have sight of the deployment plans this is what Manshure is going to Manshure's point there it's for the USO provider and the R100 contractors to share that information so obviously do you accept the point here that there is a risk of customer confusion but it wouldn't be on the consumer to go and find out when our 100 is coming to their premise that will take place behind the scenes that our 100 contractor and the USO provider No I appreciate that you haven't answered my question sorry my question was if they have no idea when our 100 is coming to them either via proactive or reactive measure but they would like better broadband now can they utilise USO and is that deliverable to a single house in the middle of nowhere given that coming down the line? So the short answer is yes they can utilise the USO the point around them being in the middle of nowhere is the question or the point there around the sort of cost threshold for them and how would the operator actually come out to them so there's the demand aggregation point so if it's to speed up the deployment of the USO and reduce the cost of it and assumption that 70 per cent of premises in that area or cluster of premises however it's yet to be determined how that's defined they would be able to request the USO so the whole point there is it's a legal right to request that there is some criteria there that might affect the sort of cost and the speed of it coming to you but it is a legal right to be able to request that and it's worth making a point a sort of R100 point as well is worded in the broadband universal service order that is publicly funded so the same applies to the schemes in Wales and in Northern Ireland as well and it's designed to address that point that you made about public funds and duplications Timing as we said we expect customers to be able to order a USO from at the latest by the beginning of next year or the end of this year so roughly that's the time scale so when they can start actually ordering and then they've got a 12 month time scale so we will use the best visibility we have to make sure the USO provider can take into account of an R100 delivery now if at some time a customer has ordered USO and again this is a 10 megabit connection at a reasonable price so there will be some price restrictions there if any other service becomes available after that date there will be a choice from the customer to upgrade to a 30 meg connection with a different contract so the flexibility will be there to your other point as Johnny's pointed out there will be obviously a long tail of individual residences where the cost will be prohibitive and the first approach is to see can we actually aggregate the cost to some extent and solve it on a group level and that's the first port of call beyond that technically we will be working with the USO provider the small minority of really extreme cases what are the other technical solutions that are available that could be used as a backup and in which case can they be applied so our aim is to at least have a solution for everybody wherever possible I think that the message is something that the committee has been asking for a long time is the importance of getting the exact dates for roll out in specific areas I think it's just about every committee meeting we've had when it comes to broadband it's been real bad Peter, I'm going to come to you now Just following up on that Jamie mentioned contracts but we were told that the Scottish Government was aiming to announce that contracts had been signed by early 2019 we are unaware of how far along that process has gone do you feel that R100 is already slipping behind schedule or are we evidently going to hear that contracts are going to be signed very shortly or do you know? We're not privy to that information we have to focus as Jonathan said on our statutory responsibilities for implementation of the UK universal service obligation and then on any interaction and that's where our conversation is focused so we're not privy to a conversation on-going procurement dialogue that the Scottish Government's having with the different potential providers it's important to us to be able to understand when it's going to happen exactly so we can get into this detailed conversation about the sharing of data but we're no more privy to that information than here or anywhere else Okay, following on from that Open Reach I believe has got something called a copper rearrangement programme to allow upgrades to exchange only cardlets mainly in rural areas do you know if that programme is on time and on schedule and will be completed in time to allow the further rollout We know that we have an open reach monitoring unit which is looking into detail at all of the programmes and as part of the commitments from last year that have been implemented and we had an interim report in November of last year and we're going to have the full annual report later this year so they will be reporting on all the relevant programmes where Open Reach is and how they're performing so that update I think it's in the summer the first annual report so we take our role in that very seriously with the new commitments we have a clear role in that monitoring unit to make sure they are delivering on their promises so we will look at that I mean specifically there has been a long programme of upgrading all the exchanges to the next generation which allows full fibre so that is proceeding in the rural areas in particular it's due to the challenge that we mentioned earlier it needs a bit of a boost to speed up I mean there's no data in the rural areas the big problem often is you can be connected to a green cabinet but you're too far down the line you've got too much copper between you and that cabinet to be any use and you end up with still one or two or three megs is the maximum you can achieve so in some respects they tell you you're connected to a cabinet but there's no damn use because you're too far down that copper line and in a nutshell that is exactly it you can make technology as complicated as we want it to be but the bottom line is the longer the distance on your copper line to the nearest exchange or cabinet and not only that but the variability of that distance hugely impacts the quality of service people get so while you might have a fibre going to the exchange or you might have the fibre going from the exchange to the cabinet if you have a huge variability of the distance to that cabinet you can't guarantee any quality of service so that's the biggest challenge that is the fundamental challenge in Scotland where there's a huge variability of distances from individual houses to the nearest cabinets so bring in Stuart and come back to you for the next question, sorry Stuart I just wanted to be very specific because Aberdeenshire and I think Dumfries and Galloway in particular are areas where there's a much higher proportion of exchange only lines than is the case elsewhere and therefore you're automatically excluded even if your copper is short enough from the prospect being connected to the current generation of roll-out of fibre-enabled copper isn't there a focus in Ofcom in these particular areas where the copper rearrangement programme is particularly and locally important in a way that it is less important for homes that I know in central Edinburgh that are also direct exchange only so you're quite right to point out that Scotland in general has a higher there's more exchange only cabinets in Scotland compared with the rest of the UK I think it's 5% it was 8% last year but it's 5% compared with the UK average of 3% so it's worth pointing out obviously and essentially it's open reach as they deploy their network where they go that they will make those upgrades but all the work initiatives and schemes that we've just been speaking about today they will have to be upgraded as part of that process in order to deliver superfast speeds to people full fibre investment so those cabinets obviously are restrictive in the speeds that people can get in rural areas for the reasons that Mansour said about the length of the line but those cabinets should be upgraded as part of open reaches on going when? I mean that way obviously we don't have oversight of open reaches commercial deployment plans but that we would expect to see that as part of our 100 programme as part of the investment in full fibre and potentially as well through USO I mean we're focusing in particularly hard to reach the last 8% so how important will other technologies for instance fixed wireless access networks be a solution to these particularly hard to reach areas I mean you did mention it before is this going to be one of the main issues the main ways that we can achieve our 100 how important is it? Yeah and so first of all to hook into the point about SSE if you were talking about a licence beyond fibre in terms of putting an antenna on their masks then they could actually ask for fixed wireless and spectrum is available now on a licence plus we're also consulting on shared spectrum 3.8 to 4.2 but if it's specifically the R100 so again when the Scottish Government ask us our opinion on what are the technologies we're clear that in rural areas such as that if you have that situation with the variability of the lines it will be foolish not to look at all the options to make sure you can reach all the customers so it should be in the mix now I can't tell you you need to ask the R100 team whether they're actually actively promoting that but in our technical advice we've said it should be in the mix as a whole across all of the UK and Scotland in particular we have made it clear that for USO fixed wireless has a huge impact it has a huge impact in two ways really one is that the existing fixed wireless services that are being rolled out across the rural areas where those copper lines are way too long to get a decent service sometimes the radio waves are a better better shout if they can have that line of sight and so there are several mobile operators are rolling this out in the rural areas what they're doing is providing an equivalent of the 10 meg service to customers in those areas so what we did on that we did quite a lot of analysis what we wanted to do was make sure that if an operator is providing a fixed wireless service is the quality of that service the reliability, the capacity of that service is similar to a 10 meg line so we did a full analysis on that using probes and using real customers and we're confident that it is for the 10 meg service we wouldn't say it's equivalent necessarily to full fibre so we've accepted that if people are we're encouraging operators to roll out because especially for the 10 meg the people who have nothing and then beyond that if one of the USO providers cannot get a fixed solution to the people who are in scope for the USO but they can do it through fixed wireless then that's something that we're also going to have a good look at and offer that as one of the solutions because the reality is this is so hard to solve for everybody that you need to have as many tools fixed wireless is one of them so fixed wire so fixed wire could well deliver 30 megs you said it would be a solution to get at least 10 but could it deliver 30? that's a really good question so on the 10 meg bit the USO we've done the analysis and we're confident that it can be used we would prefer it to be fixed but it can be used on the 30 meg we've looked at that more in the analysis 5G fixed wireless and as you know one of the mobile operators in the UK has been quite public about their plans to offer fixed wireless over the existing 5G spectrum that they're rolling out our feeling is that if it's done the right way they could offer an equivalent to superfast 30 meg where it's not there at the moment it's ultra fast I mean full fibres still full fibres the only solution to get 300 meg together with cable obviously and fixed technologies okay thank you and the next question is John Mason John thanks convener I mean we've had some mention of mobiles before so I always wanted to kind of move back to that we were provided with a table which shows the kind of level of coverage different aspects of 4G and voice and it was just to confirm one of the figures were given was that there's good 4G indoor coverage from at least one operator in 99 per cent of premises can you just confirm am I understanding these figures correctly with these do they sound correct sorry Mr Mason is this from the connected nations I am not sure where the figures came from I'm being told it is so just to understand that that was so broadly speaking indoor coverage in Scotland is comparable to the rest of the UK 90 per cent that specific example there is from at least one operator there is 100 per cent indoor coverage and indoor coverage means inside a building any building from at least one operator is that on Saturday I was in a restaurant which happened to be underneath an old church in my constituency and I don't think there was any coverage on an operator though so it depends of course I can check on that this is a tricky subject because it's very difficult to have clarity and we're working on making our connections even more clear so first of all in terms of indoor coverage there is a clear leader in our statistics and that's because there was a coverage obligation on 4G for indoor coverage for one operator in terms of voice so when we talk about 4G coverage we have a minimum of 2 megabits data whereas when you talk about the voice statistics that can include 3G as well so that's why the numbers are slightly different but to your point about there are places where you don't get indoor coverage that is true and every calculation is an approximation as you know a church is not the same as a bungalow so whatever stone houses are different and the more double and triple glazing you put in unfortunately your indoor coverage is going to go down that's the reality because when you stop heat going out you stop radio signals coming in so the reality is this is an approximation so we use when we report we have to take something that is communicable so we take an assumption of the loss of signal going into an average household what that means is if you're in the basement or if you're in a stone church etc you may not always have that coverage but otherwise we would have a 1000 page report for all the buildings in the country so unfortunately that's where we're trying our best to be through I think it's very dangerous using 100% as a figure for indoor voice coverage from at least one operator I mean there's plenty of places I would suggest everyone's got in their constituency where you get no coverage in houses so 100% is just going to provoke people perhaps Stewart you want to come in and then I'll come back to John I just want to say I don't have outdoor coverage but also just to illustrate how severe this is they tried to fit a smart meter to us and our meter's on the outside wall of the house and it relies on connecting to a mobile network where they were told there was no signal they spent two thirds of a day they installed it they waited in an hour no coverage they then spent another two hours taking it away again so 100% I really saw you not to use 100% number even if I am the only example in Scotland that beats it and I was about to say and I know I won't be I think we'd quite like to come back to you because I don't think that was a figure from connected nations but we're happy to clarify it that's been us we've varied a little bit there between I was kind of concentrating indoor to start with expanded but that was the next point is the kind of geographic coverage and I mean we've had various figures mentioned I think again the figure I've been given is that in Scotland good 4G geographic coverage from all operators would be 38% but good 4G geographic coverage from at least one operator would be 78% is there a target for that maybe that's been mentioned already but is there a target for where that should be going so the so the latest geographic coverage is now 41% 41% we've seen that improvement the connected nations report I mean this is obviously a mansures area but the connected nations report isn't designed to set out policy objectives and targets it's more about presenting the state of communications across the UK so there's a retrospective look there as well the targets that have been mentioned already for Scotland which was the 74% coverage target for geographic coverage that's linked to the auction of the 700 megahertz band which is particularly good for rural coverage so there's a coverage obligation target which is separate to what we're reporting on in connected nations and that kind of land target is that just any land because for a lot of motorists and things the roads that matter either the motorways or the A roads probably is there any way of differentiating them and specifically measuring how they're doing just to clarify the government has a target of 95% geographical on the long term so we broadly support that target as an overall ambition and as Johnny said the coverage obligations are a step towards that to your point about roads we think that roads are obviously an area of importance and we're planning to increase our focus on that we're taking views from around the country one of the things we'd like to do is give a bit more clarity on the coverage and we have a few sentences in connected nations at the moment we think we need to give a bit more clarity on the quality and spread and choice on road coverage and rail coverage across the UK and we hope to do that sometime during this year so it might be in the updates it's likely to be at the final annual report in December but in the meantime we might be able to give a bit more clarity during some of the quarterly updates as well okay thank you and I think can I just ask you too about 5G and where we're going with that because I think there's been some commitment to publish findings of a minimum level of service for 5G on that I'm not sure about commitment on minimum level of service what's very clear and it's actually good news is that we'll have the first commercial launches of 5G this year so from our perspective we'd like to get ready to make sure that we can start reporting on the quality and coverage of 5G in at least the same way if not better as we do today with existing technologies so as part of that we may be looking at what's relevant and useful to consumers around the UK in terms of what it means for them whether that's a minimum level of service whether it's a speed whether it's a coverage issue or else that'll be part of the mix and the whole question of rural and urban has already been mentioned there's a project called 5G rural first can you say anything on that? it's a wonderful project I absolutely love it and it was actually when I was many years ago in my previous roles I used to come up to Inverness and we kicked off what we called the innovation Scottish innovation partnership we didn't really know where it was going but we just thought we had to do something to get people to focus more on the rural areas that's most of the people there now have morphed into this DCMS funded project rural first I was at their event last Thursday in Glasgow what they're doing now what they're doing is focused on the really difficult there are many of the things we've discussed about they're trying to crack those it's not really 5G yet because the 5G terminals weren't really available until this year the good news is that project has been extended by the government so it's going to run into next year and we'll have the real 5G kit coming in and the Orkneys is a key focus for that as you know but also other areas around Scotland so many of the innovations that I mentioned previously to the question from Gay Ros I've asked DCMS to include them in the future extensions of that project or more specific rural projects what I'd like to draw the attention to is what that project does is absolutely the right thing for this country because number one it gets everybody who's involved in that together and look at the real problems in a real pragmatic way of how to solve them number two it's turning the perceived weaknesses into strengths so everything we've said about why it's so difficult in Scotland they've actually put their finger on those how can we get across those and break down those barriers I was with the team in Barcelona the Mobile World Congress where 107,000 people came and they were presenting there and I got attention from every country that passed by the stand it got an amazing amount of focus because nobody else in the world is really trying to solve the rural problem with 5G and the way they're doing it is to look at what are the new technologies in 5G that could help the rural coverage problem and I think it's just exciting to hear from many governments and regulators that this is one of the most innovative 5G projects and again I would say if you know the difficulties that we face in Scotland how can you turn them into strengths it's by showcasing that type of innovation here and the talent here in Scotland and opening it up to the world so I think it's a fantastic project and you should all go to the Orkneys my colleague Philip was there yesterday and it's the most amazing project very very challenging and they haven't solved a lot of problems but it's definitely worth a visit okay thanks much Jamie you had a brief question which will be the last one something we haven't really touched on what work is Ofcom doing to promote some of the voucher schemes that are available I think we've heard very little about them unfortunately there are some good schemes around such as the gigabit voucher scheme which offers up to £2,500 to businesses and of course the extension of the better broadband subsidy scheme which offers £350 to those living in rural areas to connect at home I think awareness amongst consumers in Scotland is very low of these voucher schemes and the work has been done to improve that so we don't have a formal function in the promotion of those schemes but I think you're right it's definitely one of the things that we've wrestled with over the last couple of years is the fact that there's an availability of services or schemes that and people haven't been taking them up which is something that we stress in the connected nations report as well and there's additional schemes like the local fibre network one where the UK Government is providing money to local authorities for improving services in public buildings as well I think we need to do more frankly I think we need to work with the government's plural and probably with local government and potentially other public service bodies to do more promotion of it it's a strand of work that we're having to look at with the implementation of universal service obligation is consumer advice and information because as you've pointed out Mr Greene it's quite confusing this space so one of the things that we'll be doing is trying to set this out in a simple way so people understand what's available to them Thank you very much I think that's all the questions so thank you Glen, Jonathan and Ransfer it's very interesting as always to hear the work that's going on so thank you for the evidence this morning and I'm briefly going to suspend the meeting could I ask committee members to be back in here by 10 to 12 please welcome back and to the rural economy and connectivity meeting I'd like to move on to agenda item 3 which is European Union withdrawal act we have received consent notifications in relation to UK SIs as detailed on the agenda they cover common agricultural policy and food and drink policy these instruments are being laid in the UK Parliament in relation to the European Union withdrawal act 2018 does anyone wish to make any comments on the instruments ok so the question therefore is does the committee agree to write to the Scottish Government to confirm it is content for consent for the UK SIs referred to in the notification to be given are we all agreed we are agreed and the committee will now move into private session thank you