A multi-million pound project which will revolutionise business and domestic life across North Yorkshire is about to be signed off by North Yorkshire County Council.

Connecting North Yorkshire will make high-speed broadband available to the vast majority of communities across the county, opening new business opportunities while at the same time giving private households the kind of online access currently only enjoyed by the residents of major cities.

County Councillor and chairman of Connecting North Yorkshire, Carl Les, says: “It’s not an exaggeration to compare this sweeping technological revolution to the creation of the railways in the nineteenth century, or the development of air travel in the twentieth.

“It will boost the economy of North Yorkshire in so many ways – by giving existing small businesses the opportunity to expand their markets and work more efficiently, and by attracting start-up firms to a part of the world where they would not previously have been viable.”

Last week, the Council’s Executive agreed on a preferred bidder to take the Connecting North Yorkshire initiative forward. The bidder will be announced later this month.

The Council will invest almost £25m in the scheme – the funding coming from Broadband UK and the European Regional Development Fund.

It’s expected that the successful bidder will broadly match that amount, adding up to a total investment of some £50m in an underground network of fibre-optic cables.