Making Kent (and Darent Valley) Quicker

As described in an earlier post, Kent County Council has been working for some years to bring faster broadband to those parts of the county - around a quarter of properties - that will not benefit from the unaided commercial development of the network. In my previous Cabinet role at KCC I oversaw our agreement last year with government agency BDUK and BT and I remain involved in our monitoring of that programme and our development of new broadband initiatives.

Last year's agreement - part of the 'Making Kent Quicker' scheme - involved a £40 million investment (£10 million of it from KCC) to ensure that at least 91% of Kent properties had access to superfast broadband - defined as download speeds of 24 Megabits per second (MBpS) or faster - and that all properties had access to at the very least 2 MBpS in the project area. This would bring superfast broadband to over 120,000 properties across Kent and be concluded by the end of 2015. The main method of achieving this is to bring fibre to each of the BT cabinets that you will see dotted around the area by adding an extra cabinet next to the existing one.

By the end of September, more than 50,000 properties had been covered by the scheme. More immediately relevant to Darent Valley residents, Sevenoaks District was within Phase 2 of the scheme that ran from March to September, i.e. it has just been concluded. The Farningham exchange, serving much of the Division, was one of the later exchanges in the District to be enabled to supply fibre to the cabinets it serves, but this took place in early September.

You can check out the position for your own home using the postcode checker onwww.kent.gov.uk/broadband  This is updated very rapidly after fibre is brought to each cabinet, so the information should be very current. You will then need to contact your Internet Service Provider to upgrade. Some of the most remote areas may not have been covered in this phase but will be part of a final, County-wide phase in the latter part of 2015.

Longer term, there will be a Phase 2 to Making Kent Quicker, to which central government and KCC are each committing £5.6 million with the aim of achieving at least 95% superfast coverage by the end of 2017. It is anticipated that the contract for this will be awarded in April 2015. BDUK are currently developing a Phase 3 programme to tackle the most difficult areas of all ('the final 5%').Kent is a national pilot area for work currently being undertaken by BDUK, to trial new technologies, which will inform these plans to achieve full coverage.