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Superfast internet links up isolated community
ONE of Yorkshire's most isolated communities is to get a super-fast broadband connection – which could pave the way to transforming rural internet access.
The crew of the Humber lifeboat and their families – who live at the very tip of Spurn Point – will get an internet connection that is 50 times faster than most domestic customers enjoy, and is only rivalled by networks in Japan and South Korea.
Until now, the little community of 22 people who live at Britain's only full-time lifeboat station have had to make do with a very slow dial-up connection, which means they can do little more than send emails or view news websites.
But work starts this weekend to install a fibre optic cable to the lifeboat station and the surrounding seven houses. It is being carried out by Fibrestream as a demonstration the company says could transform internet access in isolated areas.
Guy Jarvis, of Fibrestream, said one of the aims of this small scale installation is to show that fibre-optic cable and high speed broadband can be brought to isolated communities.
"We're saying that we can provide 'next generation' internet access to the most remote rural location in Yorkshire, so we can provide a service to other locations which are less remote. We're proving a point."
Getting to the mainland would cost about 60,000 and the plan is to recoup this money from the monthly subscriptions charged to users. The idea is that the communities served by these high-speed fibre optic cables will ultimately own them.
A lack of high-speed internet access in rural areas of Yorkshire is a very contentious issue.
At the edge of town the "information superhighway" becomes the "information superfootpath". Research carried out by Yorkshire Forward in North Yorkshire found that more than 20 per cent of the population gets less than 2Mb per second speed, the minimum target under the government's Digital Britain report for 2012, and many of those are in the countryside.
Don't miss Country Week, in tomorrow's Yorkshire Post, for full details of the Spurn internet plan.
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Weather for Yorkshire
Saturday 11 February 2012
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: -2 C to 1 C
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