Kent County Council (KCC) has revealed that it spent £486,000 over the past 4 years to broadband enable 6,800 properties in the region, cutting the number of Kentish homes without good internet access from 37,958 to 21,026. The council has now confirmed that its grant scheme will continue until everybody is able to get broadband.

Last year the council issued a crucial report into the regions broadband coverage, which revealed that Virgin Media UK's cable service could reach 38.3% of households, VFast's wireless service could cover 33.9% and BT managed 97.4%. However 40% were still unable to get download speeds of 4Mbps and roughly one quarter couldn't even get 2Mbps.


Estimates suggest that it could cost anything upwards of around £211m to bring Next Generation Access (NGA) broadband services, such as the BT 40Mbps FTTC technology, to around 40% of the region (deprived areas), with the market (private sector) expected to handle 60% of better off locations.


The statistics suggest that many parts of Kent are unlikely to join the "super-fast" broadband train for awhile and not without a significant investment of public money by central government. Sadly by 2012 the government will initially only have £200-300m to spread around the whole country.

However KCC hopes to make further grants available in 2011 and will be seeking to connect up the remaining homes with basic broadband as a priority. This is likely to be done by a mix of BT upgrades and fixed wireless ISP improvements from VFast.