Overcoming the hills and dales to get connected

Reaching Sylvia Szejna's house at the back of beyond in Newtondale involves a careful drive along the kind of forest tracks which give rally drivers a buzz.

Poor communications round here then? Not at all. The internet connection just installed for Mrs Szejna is fast. "We haven't had any internet connection for about four years, we were on 'dial-up' before that," she says. "It was so slow and nobody could ever phone us because it used the phone line and my son was using the internet."

Her new broadband connection is more than a hundred times faster and doesn't use the phone line. It's thanks to a bespoke new network set up for the villages and isolated homes north of Pickering.

It's generally assumed the most modern technology for delivering broadband, fibre optic cable, is only available in urban areas. But step forward a "community interest company" called Nextgenus UK, run for the benefit of local people. It has got Sylvia Szejna and her neighbours around the villages of Newton-on-Rawcliffe and Stape online and up-to-date.

Any profit Nextgenus makes has to be ploughed back into the community. Their approach is to piggy-back on the system which delivers the internet into North Yorkshire's schools, libraries and council offices.

Technically known as a "Fat-Pipe", this is is the digital equivalent of a large water main.

Called NYnet, this is owned by the county council, and cannot sell its services commercially. But NYnet can be made available to a company like Nextgenus who access the "fat pipe" to deliver a link to individual homes and businesses in out-of-the-way places.

Guy Jarvis, the boss of Nextgenus, says, "In North Yorkshire, research by Yorkshire Forward said 24 per cent of the population couldn't get decent connectivity. Out of a population of 1.4 million, that's in excess of a quarter of a million people."

There is no universal service obligation for the internet. Most broadband is delivered by sending a digital signal over a copper telephone line. It's cheap, but limited by the distance from the nearest telephone exchange and the quality of the line. And the further you go down the wire, the weaker the signal.

With fibre optic cable, the signal is sent in tiny light pulses along a glass filament with a far greater capacity for carrying data and it will run for dozens of miles with virtually no loss in quality.

The fat pipe of NYnet delivers signals to Lady Lumley's secondary school in Pickering, four miles from Newtondale. It doesn't sound far, but the terrain is challenging and the means to overcome that has been to erect an array of radio masts. These are arranged to bounce the broadband radio signals around geographical obstacles. "The biggest challenge is the lie of the land, the topology." says Guy Jarvis "When you look at the North York Moors, north of Pickering it's almost a cliff that you're going up.

"To get a wireless signal in, you need a good line of sight. So instead of going on a direct four-mile journey from the school to the villages, we've had to go on a 16-mile journey. From the school we move due west a couple of miles, we then go down about eight miles into the Vale of Pickering, and then we bounce back from there, because at that point we're far enough away from the cliff. There's a reservoir which is a great vantage point and that uses a solar powered rig to bounce the signal into the villages."

These relay masts or nodes, generally cost 500-1,000 to install and the network here uses six. The cost can be reduced by mounting them on existing buildings. According to Simon Davison the operation director for Nextgenus, they easily undercut BT prices for installing fibre optic cables. "BT says it's 150 per metre, we have done it for as low as 6.47."

BT say they have no standard cost. The price they quote would depend on the amount of engineering work required.

For short distances over farmland, Nextgenus use a mole plough to lay cable. Guy Jarvis says: "With conventional trench digging you might be able to do 500 metres a day. With this we can do 3,000 metres in an hour. We've costed this project at 40-50,0000, with 25,000 put in by North Yorkshire County Council and the rest was put in by us as an 'in-kind' contribution to make it happen. There's 141 homes and businesses within the two parishes. So it's under 300 per home."

The set-up fee is 100, then 20 per month for the basic package and 50 for the business connection with 10 Mb/s both upload and download. They also offer a telephone service using VOIP (voice over internet protocol, like Skype but better).

Most of this network uses wireless connections. The aim, long-term, is to re-invest any profits to put in fibre optic cabling.

What is the pay-off for business users? Until he retired recently, Ian Williams ran a mail order company. "Before we got broadband, I could spend all morning just downloading and processing the paperwork for orders," he says. "When I got broadband, that was done in 15 minutes."

BT says it is investing 1.5bn to get fibre to at least 10m homes by mid 2012, says a spokesman. "However, delivering fibre access on a commercial basis to rural areas is challenging and will require some form of public sector support, as it has in other countries."

In the recent Budget, Chancellor Alistair Darling re-stated his commitment to Britain becoming a digital world leader. He announced super-fast broadband for 90 per cent of homes by 2017, to be paid for by a 6 annual tax on landline phones.

Maybe the Newtondale model is one for other Yorkshire communities

to follow and get in first with their own unique solutions.