Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
The Scottish Government yesterday set out their work plan for the next five years, which among other things initiated a feasibility study to “identify and evaluate potential options” for deploying a new subsea fibre optic cable between mainland Scotland and the Shetland Islands. The goal being to improve broadband and mobile redundancy, as well as performance.
Shetland is already connected by two major subsea fibre cables, including the SHEFA-2 (Faroese Telecom) submarine (subsea) and the R100 North cable that was recently built by broadband giant BT as part of the Scottish Government’s £600m Reaching 100% (R100) project (here). The R100 project also built a number of smaller subsea fibre links between mainland Shetland and its smaller islands.
Despite this, Shetland occasionally suffers from subsea cable breaks (two occurred in 2025 alone), which cause plenty of disruption to parts of the island’s broadband and mobile services when they occur (often lasting several weeks). The nature of the local network arrangements also means that some operators don’t currently harness all of the available subsea links, which can make the impact of such outages quite variable.