The British Broadcasting Corp. said that 378 telephone exchanges located in remote and rural areas were upgraded to broadband over the last eight months as part of the Scottish Executive's overall broadband initiative.

Government officials and telecom executives said the expansion would be a boost to Scotland's economy, particularly to companies in the countryside that increasingly rely on high-speed data transfers.

The strategy for 2006 will be to identify scattered clusters of households that are still out of reach of commercial broadband networks or too far from DSL facilities.