Park's rural residents celebrate high-speed internet connections

An existing underground fibre optic cable between the Kirkbymoorside telephone exchange and Gillamoor primary school will be connected to an upgraded terminal and wireless infrastructure in the national park over the next six months.

The new terminal might also enable national park residents to use some mobile phones through the attachment of special equipment at their homes. There is currently no mobile reception in the national park.

The "fantastic" news, as Dave Wood, chairman of Moorsweb Community Broadband, described it, has been made possible by a 25,000 grant from the regional development agency, Yorkshire Forward, and North Yorkshire County Council.

The council intends to use Moorsweb, which is one of the largest community broadband groups in North Yorkshire, as a showcase.

A further 25,000 has come from an anonymous benefactor. The benefactor, who lives in the area has paid for equipment upgrades to make Moorsweb more reliable and faster.

Despite the best efforts of Moorsweb, run by a non-profit-making group of committed volunteers, many of its 138 members have complained about days and even weeks without a broadband connection.

Reliable broadband is essential for the many small businesses which have set up in the area in recent years.

Three working days or more without the internet is very damaging to customer relations and profitability.

It often means the businessman or woman has to resort to using a neighbour's internet connection with another service provider or making a long journey to another office.

Moorsweb has been struggling to cope with the popularity of services such as BBC iplayer, music file sharing, sending photos, and videos, downloading films, and using devices such as Sling-box to divert television from home to wherever the consumers are travelling.

At peak times members' activities have sometimes brought the network to a standstill, and the heaviest users have been 'throttled' to keep the system running.

Once the new terminal is installed at Gillamoor school, Moorsweb plans to buy extra bandwidth to double its download capabilities and increase its upload bandwidth by six times.

Moorsweb's competitors are also supplying broadband to the national park but the service is patchy depending on where customers live.

Moorsweb intends to introduce a new tiered membership structure which will range from 17.50 to about 28 a month. Once a member's data allowance has been used up, he or she will have to pay an extra 5 for every 5 extra gigabytes.

All members currently pay only 17.50 a month but new automated equipment will soon measure how much bandwidth they are all using.

But Moorsweb project manager Barry Sunley said: "My biggest nightmare is that when households realise how much their children are using, they will not want to pay for it."

At Moorsweb's third annual general meeting at Hutton-le-Hole some members were concerned that most people did not know how much bandwidth they were using so now everyone will be given guidance.

Mr Sunley said: "On a couple of occasions members have threatened to withhold subscriptions or have actually done so, and I have had multiple requests for refunds.

"Moorsweb has always been a community group run at cost and has never guaranteed a specific service level although we have striven to make it as good as possible.''