The Scottish Government is studying a third subsea cable to Shetland
The Scottish Government has agreed to study a new subsea fibre cable between mainland Scotland and Shetland. It is a study, not a cable, and the difference matters. But the problem behind it will be familiar to anyone on the islands: when a subsea cable breaks, broadband and mobile go with it, sometimes for weeks.
The commitment sits in the five year work plan the government published on 1 September. As reported by ISPreview, it initiates a feasibility study to “identify and evaluate potential options” for the new cable, with the stated aim of improving broadband and mobile redundancy as well as performance. Shetland News reports the same commitment, quoting the plan’s aim of increasing network resilience and reducing vulnerability to service disruption, and lists it among the plan’s first actions. No route, cost, builder or date has been named.
Why the islands keep going dark
Shetland already has two major subsea fibre connections. One is SHEFA-2, run by Faroese Telecom. The other is the R100 North cable, built by BT under the Scottish Government’s £600m Reaching 100% programme. On paper that is redundancy. In practice ISPreview reports two subsea cable breaks affecting Shetland in 2025 alone, with the disruption to parts of the islands’ broadband and mobile often lasting several weeks.
A second cable does not always rescue you, and the reason decides whether a break reaches your house at all. ISPreview notes that the way the local network is arranged means some operators do not use every subsea link available to them. So the same break can take one provider’s customers offline while another’s carry on. That is why island outages land so unevenly.
What it changes for you
Nothing this week, wherever you live. A feasibility study is close to the cheapest promise a government can make, and no funding for an actual cable came with this one. What it does is get the problem costed, which is the step that has to happen before anybody can pay for a third cable.
If you are on the islands, the two things worth knowing before the next break are what your provider owes you and how to chase it. Our guide on what to do in a broadband outage covers the first few hours, and broadband compensation sets out when the automatic scheme pays and when it does not, because it does not cover every kind of lost service.
This is the second piece of Northern Isles broadband news today that amounts to waiting. We reported this morning that the £40.7m Project Gigabit contract for Orkney and Shetland still has not been signed. Getting fibre to island premises and keeping the islands attached to the mainland are separate problems, and both are at the stage of somebody promising to decide.
What actually reaches your address today is a different question again, and the availability checker is the only thing that answers it.