Highland Community Broadband, a volunteer-founded wireless network serving remote Wester Ross since 2017, shut down at the end of April 2026 after larger-scale voucher schemes proved unworkable for a small operator.
Highland Community Broadband began in 2017 to bring a working internet connection to part of Wester Ross that commercial providers were not going to reach. It closed on 30 April 2026, citing rising backhaul, legal, and maintenance costs it could no longer sustain.
The detail that should concern anyone designing connectivity policy: the operator says it tried to use the R100 voucher scheme and the UK Gigabit voucher scheme to fund network upgrades, and found both built around the scale and paperwork of much larger companies, not a community-run network.
This is the flip side of the community-network model we celebrate on our Global spotlight page. Volunteer and cooperative networks can do things commercial rollout won't — but only if public schemes are actually built to support them, not just the incumbents.
Vodafone withdrew its £12/month Essentials tariff, raising its entry price to £20. Virgin Media's Essential Broadband at £12.50 is now the lowest verified social tariff on the market — a reminder that these deals and their prices shift, so it's worth checking before you apply.
The government-backed Shared Rural Network has switched on its 140th mobile mast, with 49 now live in Scotland — including a second site on Islay that restores signal from all four networks to an area that previously had none.
The government-backed Shared Rural Network switched on its 50th mobile mast in Scotland on the remote Ardnamurchan peninsula, extending all-four-operator 4G coverage across more than 1,900 square kilometres of rural Scotland — an area larger than Edinburgh and Glasgow combined.
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