A VILLAGE community became so fed up with waiting for faster internet speeds they set up their own company to get the job done.

The Twyford and Ridgehill community to the south of Hereford discovered they were last in line to benefit from a council scheme called Fastershire to bring a faster internet connection to their rural villages.

Inspired by the Hereford Community Network (Callow and Dewsall) in the neighbouring valley, a team of residents took action and set up the Ridgehill Residents Community Network (RRCN).

Caroline Rixon, chairwoman of RRCN, said: “Up until a month ago we were trying to function on 0.5 megabytes per second. We thought if it can work there then why not for us?”

She runs an engineering company and there are other businesses in the area such as Little Peddlers and Architype.

Kieran Lapping, director of RRCN, said: “In the modern world you cannot live without the internet.”

They set up a community interest company and 31 villagers invested. They then sourced a contractor who installed around 4km of cable. It went live in August and now residents can access 50 megabytes per second but there is the potential to go up to 1,000 megabytes.

RRCN wants to be de-scoped out of the Gigaclear contract which Fastershire has signed for the area. This way they can apply for funding. A Fastershire spokesman said: “We requested specific information from the group about the reach and technical components of their community scheme to explore a contractual de-scope. This is relatively complex and not simply a case of taking the properties out and redistributing the funding. It is quite possible that by removing these premises, the economics change to the extent that it costs more to deliver less which would be unacceptable.”