How scotlands independence would effect current broadband ?

Just was thinking would there be a openreach scotland branch ect made if independence happens?

Or would this not change

also we may get a new currency (not the £) it would be interesting to see if prices change in relation to uk currency and if scotlands money would focus more into broadband not spots than the uk goverment is at the moment

i'm not sure if theres any BDUK funds allocated for scotland and if so would we still get if not a part of the uk?

would love to hear some thoughts on this

BT itself, being a private company, can happily operate over the borders.

The issue I think would be with regulation. It is likely that Scotland would start their own regulation of telecoms rather than being ruled by Ofcom. That means the regulation in Scotland could be very different from the rest of the UK resulting in potentially different solutions, costs and rules.

That difference in regulation could then trigger BT to setup a Scotland arm. In fact, there could just be a BT Scotland if the Scottish regulation did not require the Chinese walls between different BT divisions.

And I guess Scotland could also decide to put a USO on "superfast" broadband which could significantly change the landscape of delivery - although I would guess they would have to fund that somehow.

A little off-topic, but I wonder what they'd do about a country code TLD?

They shouldn't really use .uk and the Seychelles have already grabbed .sc

Regulation - they will need their own regulator who could just copy OFCOM but there will be a cost. The cost to Scotland will be relatively higher than that of the existing UK. Whether it is telecoms, power, or whatever, it will need to be set up. All these costs are being ignored but will have to be met ultimately by the consumers.

In reply to a post by billford:

A little off-topic, but I wonder what they'd do about a country code TLD?

They shouldn't really use .uk and the Seychelles have already grabbed .sc

They will get .nmpt Named after the Scottish Numpty Party.

I dare say that Alex Salmond has assumed they can continue using UK even if they break away from the union... Seems the general theme - keep everything they like and get rid of everything else, perfect option for Scots.

.pi is available for "Pictland". There is no obvious 2 letter TLD available that starts with S.

In reply to a post by MHC:

They will get .nmpt Named after the Scottish Numpty Party.

Nice thought

But ccTLDs are only 2 letters.

In reply to a post by billford:

... the Seychelles have already grabbed .sc

On the other hand:

In reference to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.sc:

.sc is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Seychelles. The TLD was marketed to businesses in Scotland and South Carolina, however, the domains are subject to Seychelles registry rules. While SCregistrars, a company who marketed .sc domains to a target audience of Scottish sites, has since closed down the .sc extension remains available through the Afilias Global platform via various well-known registrars internationally for direct registration at second-level.

So they could use it.

The emergence of new countries is a regular occurrence. The usual starting point for a ccTLD is the country's alpha-2 code as registered under ISO 3166-1:2013. In turn, that is likely to be an abbreviation of the alpha-3 code. The UK is unusual in that the ccTLD is .uk whereas the ISO codes are GB and GBR. Since the range of unallocated codes is increasingly restricted, there can be no assumption that new codes will correspond to simple abbreviations of the country's name in English.

21 out of 26 alpha-2 codes starting with the letter S have already been allocated and none of the unallocated alternatives is especially mnemonic (e.g. SF or SW), so the Scottish Government might opt for something completely different. Variants of Caledonia aren't much better. NB and NBR for North Britain (as in the former railway line) are available.

.nb could be attractive� as in nota bene