Residents of Iwade, a rural village in Kent (UK), can now benefit from up to 40Mbps "super-fast" FTTC fibre optic based broadband internet access thanks to a new partnership between BT and the local Parish Council. By Autumn 2010, all 1,350 premises in Iwade will have access to BT's fibre broadband service.

Iwade’s council has used a grant from Kent County Council (KCC) to help fund investment in the service, which in turn released further investment from BT and enabled the operator to deliver its Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) service to everyone in the village.


Iwade residents will be served by the neighbouring telephone exchange in Sittingbourne, which has already been selected for an upgrade to fibre broadband by BT. The extra funding from BT and Kent County Council will pay for the deployment of additional fibre from the Sittingbourne exchange to all four telephone cabinets in Iwade.


BT is clearly keen to work in partnership with public sector bodies in other parts of the country to help deliver fibre broadband to the "final third" of UK homes. This can perhaps be taken as a clever bit of PR to help BT's chances of getting public money and support an expanded rollout, albeit potentially at the cost of smaller fibre optic providers being left out.

The operator claimed that, provided local/regional public or privately sourced funding is available, other parts of the UK which are not currently included in BT's fibre plans could also stand to benefit from the technology.

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.