Local councillor Steve Delaney, who has been campaigning for fast broadband in Kingswells, was delighted by recent news that work has now started on bringing the service to Kingswells.

He said, “Well it’s finally happened. Decent broadband is coming to Kingswells and it looks like it’s going to happen this year”

It’s been a long and arduous journey with a few false starts along the way. In January 2013 an announcement was made confirming Aberdeen City Council had been successful in securing UK Government funding for an ambitious rollout of superfast broadband in current white spots and wifi for the city centre amongst other related initiatives. The package involved a number of different elements but Kingswells was in line for fibre optic high speed connection, which was welcomed by all. Unfortunately questions were then asked regarding possible State Aid implications arising from this funding stream, which put the whole project in doubt.

Thankfully Kingswells fell under the “rural” classification for the purposes of State Aid and rural aid is exempt from such regulation. Accordingly, that element of the funding package was transferred to the Scottish Government last Summer. Some details were released in the Autumn but the best indication we were getting was a programme timetable of 2014-2017. Kingswells originally had an expected “go live” date of 2014/15 so it was looking like things had slipped.

Last week’s announcement did mention Kingswells but it was once again non-specific on localised delivery timescales.

There’s map online which appears to show that Kingswells is timetabled for July – December 2014. The detail on the map is pretty poor and timescales are only indicative, so you may wish to check it out for yourself. Work has already started by way of the laying the fibre optic cabling along the A944 from Aberdeen to Westhill and an influx of BT Openreach vans in the village, so it’s all looking positive for a “live” date which is sooner rather than later.

Steve said, “Some people have been understandably been in touch querying why we can’t just have a decent speed on normal broadband as they don’t need the more expensive fibre optic option. Unfortunately this cannot be achieved without building a telephone exchange at Kingswells as the current difficulties are down to the length of cabling running from Westhill to Kingswells. The short answer is that there’s available funding for high speed fibre optic broadband but none is on offer to upgrade the older broadband technologies.

” Thankfully we’ve secured that funding and I expect most people will be happy to upgrade. This has been a long time coming and Kingswells residents will no longer be subjected to these prehistoric broadband speeds. This was something well worth fighting for and I’m delighted we’re finally going to see it happen”.