TWO rural hamlets in Cumbria can now access some of the fastest and most reliable broadband speeds in the UK.

Residents in Raisbeck and Sunbiggin in the Eden Valley joined forces with Connecting Cumbria and Openreach.

Connecting Cumbria is a partnership between central and local government and BT which works to improve broadband coverage and speeds across the county.

Situated near the famous Sunbiggin Tarn, a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and about 20 miles from Penrith, the secluded hamlets can now access speeds of up to one gigabit bit per second (1Gbps) using Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) technology, where fibre is run directly from the exchange all the way to each property.

In order to build this ‘full fibre’ network the local community dug deep to reduce the huge costs involved in reaching such a remote location. Local farmer Julian Thorpe volunteered his mole plough – a machine that helps dig cables underground - and the community set to work excavating more than 1.5 miles of trench across the 10 fields which separate the two hamlets.

Roger Frank, a retired businessman who lives in Raisbeck, was the driving force behind the upgrades. He said: “It has taken a huge amount of time and effort to get to this point, but it has certainly been worth it and I’m proud of our community for pulling together to make it happen against the odds."

“The challenges and costs to reach our community were so high that at one point it looked like it just wouldn’t happen. But we did our bit by securing private land access and the agreements needed to install apparatus on private land and then made a decision to take on board a chunk of the digging ourselves which ultimately reduced the cost to an affordable level, making the project viable.”

The Community Fibre Partnership enables Openreach to work with a community to build a customised co-funded solution and bring fibre broadband to areas not included in any existing private or publicly subsidised upgrade schemes.