EAST Riding Council has signed a £14m deal to bring superfast broadband to more than 42,000 homes across the area.
The multi-million-pound project, entitled Broadband East Riding, has seen the council and BT join forces to extend high-speed broadband to households and businesses across East Yorkshire in the next three years.
John Skidmore, interim director of corporate strategy and commissioning at East Riding Council, said: "Having access to the internet is an important aspect of modern life, with many of us using it on a daily basis, whether that is personally, such as keeping in contact with family and friends through social networks, or commercially.
"The council is committed to improving broadband infrastructure in the East Riding to ensure that we do all we can to support businesses, residents and visitors to the area to have access to broadband provision, especially given our largely rural locality, and hope to deliver this over the coming years through the contract with BT."
The council and BT are in talks to discuss which towns in the region will benefit from the scheme, but it is thought Bridlington and Driffield will be the main areas targeted.
As well as making high-speed fibre more widely available, the partnership will ensure everyone will be able to enjoy broadband speeds of more than 2Mbps.
A further aim is to provide a high-speed broadband network to an additional 42,734 premises in the area by December 2015.
BT's managing director for Next Generation Access, Bill Murphy, believes the investment is vital for businesses in the region.
He said: "Faster broadband breaks down the barriers to doing business in the digital world like online trading, which helps to empower small businesses to find new markets, sell new products, try new models and compete on an equal footing with larger businesses."
For businesses, the fibre network will underpin the introduction of many new services and applications. Big business applications driven by new "cloud" services will be within the reach of enterprises of all sizes. Computer back-up, storage and processing will be faster, and the use of high-quality videoconferencing will become a viable possibility.
Further benefits of faster broadband include users being able to use multiple bandwidth-hungry applications at the same time, and send and receive large amounts of data much more quickly and efficiently.
This will make things like gaming, watching BBC i-Player or downloading films and music much quicker and without the annoying "buffering" or screen freeze.
The £14m cost of the investment has been shared between BT, Broadband Delivery UK, the European Regional Development Fund and East Riding Council, which has supplied £500,000.
BT will announce the scheme's installation schedule in the coming months.
The first communities across the East Riding can look forward to improved access to online services and better connectivity for businesses from next summer onwards.
