Exclusive: Rural areas join internet fast lane

The pioneering NYNET project to provide high speed internet coverage across North Yorkshire was announced three years ago, although the latest stage of the initiative to include remote rural villages is only now going online.

Yorkshire has the lowest rates of internet connection in the country – 64 per cent of people are online compared with a national average of 71 per cent and vast swathes of East and North Yorkshire still cannot get broadband at all.

But a pilot has already been conducted in two isolated villages, Newton-on-Rawcliffe and Stape, near Pickering, to provide up to 150 residents and businesses with access to a broadband connection with download speeds as fast as 10 megabits per second, as part of the first project of its kind in England.

The Yorkshire Post can reveal that a second trial is due to go live by late summer to provide high-speed connections for another 400 villagers in an area of the North York Moors including Gillamoor and Hutton-le-Hole.

The roll-out is being overseen by Julie Burton, the community executive of the NYNET project.

She said: "This is perhaps the most important phase of the NYNET project so far, as it is what the scheme is all about – providing the next generation of internet access across North Yorkshire to often-isolated parts of the county.

"One of the big benefits is social inclusion – a lot of these communities can feel extremely isolated from the rest of the country because they have not been given access to fast internet connections.

"It is keeping communities together as people living in these parts of the county have decided in the past that they have to move away, and it has also prevented people moving into these areas if the high-speed internet connections are not available.

"We want to show that with a little capital expenditure, we can transform these communities."

Many residents living in isolated parts of North Yorkshire are having to rely on outdated dial-up internet connections, which are excruciatingly slow and do not have the necessary bandwidth to send large documents and attachments online.

While the dial-up technology was ditched more than a decade ago in many towns and cities across the country, isolated rural communities often still have to rely on the connections.

The NYNET scheme, which is owned by North Yorkshire County Council, has provided faster internet coverage by establishing a network of connections at schools, libraries and the local authority's offices.

However, independent companies have to be set up to "piggy-back" the technology to provide the internet connections to individual businesses and residents as NYNET is owned by the public sector and cannot sell its services commercially.

A community interest company called NextGenUs UK was established to oversee the pilot scheme for Newton-on-Rawcliffe and Stape, while another venture, called LN Communications, will be responsible for co-ordinating the second trial centred on Gillamoor.

Officials from NYNET are in the process of drawing up bids for funding, including an attempt to secure 500,000 from the Rural Development Programme for England which would help finance up to another 10 projects.

However, Ms Burton stressed that several hundred schemes involving community interest companies would need to be established to provide blanket coverage of high-speed internet access to isolated communities across North Yorkshire, which is England's largest county.

The NYNET broadband project was heralded as important as the arrival of the railways when it was announced in February of 2007.