Alston in Cumbria is one of the most rural parishes in England. It was also one of the first to establish a successful community broadband project, and more recently has upgraded to fibre-to-the-home. A lot of the history and detail can be found on the Alston Cybermoor website. There is also an interesting article on the BCC News website that mentions Alston. This article discusses the launch of their upgraded Alston fibre network in 2010. Fibre-to-the-home gives a potentially very high performance and future-proofed solution. As demand grows, fibre can sustain almost unlimited traffic, and it is a simple matter to upgrade equipment to continue to meet demand.

Rutland Telecom provided fibre-to-the-cabinet broadband to the village of Lyddington last year. Fibre to the cabinet involves a high speed fibre connection to a green street cabinet, with your existing copper phone line used to connect the last hop to your house. Broadband speeds are usually between 5Mbps and 40Mbps using this technology. This is the technology advertised as "BT Infinity".

In rural lancashire, the village of Wray installed a wireless mesh network in a project run with the University of Lancaster. Relatively low cost wireless routers, of the sort used to connect to a broadband connection, are loaded with modified software so that they talk to each other and form a mesh that will relay connections wirelessly across an area. While this technology is relatively low cost to get up and running, speeds are variable, and slow down particularly when a lot of people are online. The solution is probably best suited to very difficult to reach properties with no other way to get broadband. Wray is currently piloting the latest very high speed wireless routers in an effort to further improve their connectivity.

More locally, Kent County Council has provided grants to fund a number of successful projects. In Iwade near Sittingbourne, a KCC grant helped fund fibre-to-the-cabinet. A Telegraph article provides a useful summary of the Iwade project.

Previous schemes involved KCC advertising tenders for grants to fill broadband notspots and slow spots. In several cases, the tender was won by a company called vfast which provides solutions based on wireless connectivity. Vfast provides speeds of 10Mbps or in some cases higher. Local examples include Tilmanstone, Sutton-By-Dover, Womenswold and Barham.

KCC has also provided grant funding for a fibre-to-the-home initiative in Selling near faversham which is expected to go live in late winter / early spring 2011.