Scotland Starts Shetland Cable Feasibility Study

Mark Jackson, ISPreview UK
September 2, 2026

The Scottish Government has started a feasibility study into possible options for a new subsea fibre route between mainland Scotland and the Shetland Islands. The work appears in the government’s five-year programme and is intended to examine how another cable could improve broadband and mobile resilience, as well as performance. The source material stresses that beginning a feasibility study does not amount to a firm decision to deploy an additional system.

Shetland is already served by two major subsea fibre links: Faroese Telecom’s SHEFA-2 system and R100 North, which BT recently built through the Scottish Government’s six-hundred-million-pound programme known as Reaching 100%. That programme also delivered smaller subsea fibre connections between mainland Shetland and nearby islands. Even with those links in place, Shetland has experienced outages from cable faults, including two breaks during 2025, with disruption sometimes lasting for weeks.

The study’s importance is centred on resilience rather than basic availability of connectivity. The source notes that not every operator currently uses all available subsea links, meaning the effect of a fault can differ across services and providers. Another mainland route could reduce vulnerability to disruption and add diversity for broadband and mobile networks. The source also says stronger redundancy could potentially help attract data centres, but that remains uncertain and is not confirmed as an outcome.

The present milestone is the feasibility study itself, which forms part of activity in the first year of the 2026-27 government programme. No construction decision, funding award, route selection or delivery schedule has been confirmed. VodafoneThree UK is also conducting its own feasibility work on a possible new subsea fibre cable for Shetland. The outcome of both processes remains open, and any actual cable build would require decisions beyond the studies now underway. Different providers rely on different routes, so the existence of two links has not produced uniform redundancy for every subscriber. The study can therefore examine physical route diversity alongside how operators actually use the infrastructure already available.

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