BARBON and Middleton are the latest Dales communities to get together to bring hyperfast fibre optic broadband to each home in their villages.

From a launch meeting at Barbon Village Hall in April last year, the first properties have already been connected and are enjoying speeds of up to 1 Gigabit per second by direct fibre optic cable connection and up to 200/300 Mbps by WIFI.

Working with Broadband for the Rural North Ltd (B4RN), much of the digging to bring the cable to the villages has been carried out by local volunteers and the vast majority of funding has been raised by local residents investing in B4RN shares.

B4RN Barbon and Middleton Community Group Chairman, Kevin Taylor, said: “This project just goes to show what a community can achieve when everyone pulls together. As well as enjoying the benefits of hyperfast broadband ourselves, we are future proofing our two rural communities.”

Now the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority has awarded the project a grant of £9,900 from its Sustainable Development Fund to fund the cost of the main B4RN fibre optic control cabinet at Barbon Village Hall. It serves both Barbon and Middleton communities and links forward to Dent and Garsdale.

Chris Clark, the authority’s Member Champion for Sustainable Development, said: “This is the eighth B4RN community broadband project that we have been able to support with the authority’s Sustainable Development Fund, investing a total of £81,000 in improved broadband infrastructure in the National Park.

“Access to good quality broadband is critical to strong, self-reliant and balanced communities and is a real challenge for small, remote communities that have been overlooked in the national roll-out so far. These are exactly the sort of projects our Sustainable Development Fund is designed to support.”

More details about the Sustainable Development Fund can be found on the National Park Authority website at www.yorkshiredales.org.uk/sdf .