Kent Addresses Notspots
Kent County Council has budgeted to spend up to £50,000 in each of several parishes that experience poor fixed line broadband speeds. The £50,000 limit falls under the EU de minimis rule that exempts it from being considered State Aid.
Proposals are being sought from third parties to supply a minimum 2M service to Iwade, Selling and Womenswold while the parishes of Kings Hill and Crockham Hill will be putting forward their own solutions. Solutions are required to be self sustaining after the initial setup subsidy.
Agreement in principal has been reached to allow use of the Council’s own network connections into local schools as part of the solution.
[ Kent CC RFP ]
Category: Broadband Availability, Broadband Issues
July 12th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Brilliant. Kent leads the way. Hope the other councils will take note. I don’t see how BT market failure can even be counted against the state aid rules, but there you go. Well done Kent.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
it’s a lot easier if you don’t have to demonstrate market failure and show how a plethora of companies have not delivered a service.
July 12th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Would probably bankrupt all the councils if they did the same though, there are thousands of areas where market failure can be proven. Lancashire and Cumbria could greatly benefit if CLEO could be persuaded to take part in this initiative. CLEO has the most fantastic infrastructure for education, but because of state aid rules it hasn’t been able to help communities. Maybe if Kent can do it us up t’north can too?
July 13th, 2009 at 11:41 am
I’m not sure if this is a great move by a forward thinking council or just a way to offload a problem area to another organisation.
They also want this to be an organisation capable of supporting itself. Start up costs will be in the £2.5M region for Iwade (very vague estimate based on £2k cost per property) so need a long term investment plan to make anything back.
I hope someone can step in to solve this problem for them and in so doing can define an architecture that can deliver viable broadband services to notspots together with a partner who will help with the additional backhaul, network & services requirements. The considerations are huge and to submit a proposal by August 7th will be one hell of a challenge!
July 13th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
36 properties in Womenswold…
July 16th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Why don’t they work on sorting out the county town, Maidstone?
I’m in a new build (2005) flat here and we can’t get anything above 1.5Mbit! Disgusting considering I’m only 0.8km from the exchange!
August 5th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Actually, this is the second round of grants – Barham, Sutton by Dover, Tilmanstone & Ulcombe all received grants last year and all chose the solution offered by a local wireless provider (VFast) giving a 10Mb service – the grants covered infrastructure costs and some subsidy for customer installs.
We want FTTP for Kent (the solution nga uk is commenting on above, I think) but recognise we cannot fund this level of investment (c£2 billion for Kent we estimate). However, if we can get the “not spots” covered with at least basic 2Mb broadband we think this is worthwhile.
For James – absolutely we want everyone to get fast broadband – 10Mb plus (a commitment that seemed to surprise Open Reach at a recent meeting). I hope you can accept that our first priority is helping those who cannot even get broadband.