The Kent village of Iwade has received a £13,000 grant from the local council to fund fibre broadband to the area.
Kent County Council gave Iwade the grant to help fund the investment needed to bring fibre broadband to the village and will mean that by Autumn this year all the 1,350 premises in the village will be able to access the new Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) network which will give them broadband speeds up to 40Mb.
The fibre broadband deployment to the village is possible because the neighboring town of Sittingbourne is one of the locations that had been selected for it’s telephone exchange to be upgraded to support fibre broadband, the funds will be used then to deploy the fibre to 4 streetside cabinets in Iwade.
The Telegraph report that due to the £13,000 funding that they managed to raise this meant that BT would make a further £62,000 available.
The broadband committee co-ordinator for Iwade Parish Council, Nicola McKenzie said:
“As a Broadband Committee we have worked hard to reach this critical point, giving Iwade residents and businesses the option to sign up to super-fast broadband at such an early stage. Local homes and businesses are relying more and more on broadband internet services. The faster connections offered by fibre broadband will allow local people to get even more out of their broadband connection.“
BT are currently investing £2.5 billion in making fibre broadband available to around two thirds of the UK by 2015.
For any other rural villages that may want to follow Iwade’s leade BT state that:
“Currently, in order for BT to build a commercial case for rolling out fibre to such areas, the locality needs to be in close proximity to an exchange that is already included in BT’s fibre deployment plans. Technical considerations include the need for local premises to be suitably clustered while the local telephone cabinets need to be evenly spread and no more than 1km from the premises they serve.”