A RURAL church made use of its newly-installed hyperfast broadband to 'stream' a funeral service live to Australia.

Family members living in Sydney were unable to attend St John's Church in Yealand Conyers but, courtesy of an iPhone 6 and FaceTime video calling, they were able to view the entire service from their living room.

The live streaming was made possible by B4YS - the community-led project to bring broadband speeds of one gigabyte per second to homes and businesses in Storth, Silverdale and the Yealands.

The team behind the project says that "important progress is being made and challenges are quietly being overcome" as routes are planned around kitchen tables and out in the fields.

In Yealand Conyers, almost the entire village is enjoying internet speeds of more than 900Mbps per second thanks to the hard work of volunteers who have been digging routes and laying fibres. All three churches - Catholic, Church of England and Quaker - have been connected, and St John's Church says it would like to be able to routinely offer live 'streamings' of weddings and funerals.

Mole ploughing of the Yealand Redmayne routes is expected to begin this week.

Meanwhile, Silverdale has been "a very challenging parish", said area organiser Andy Wells, but the technical problems can be solved.

"Walking, researching and assessing three routes has taken an awful lot of time and effort from the committed volunteers," he said.

"However, most of the necessary wayleave agreements have been signed and we are now awaiting the final core route planning for the Silverdale part of the network being done by B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North) within the next two weeks. That will enable us to start work on installing the first cable ducts.

"Following helpful discussions with the vicar and the church council, we are pleased to report that the Silverdale hub will be located in the boiler house at St John's and fibres will be routed from there to individual subscribers. As soon as we have the first draft of the detailed roll-out plan for the entire village, we will invite shareholders and volunteers to a meeting to organise the work in detail."

In Storth, route planning for the fibre optic cables is also progressing.

Steve Spencer, area organiser for Storth, said: "Planning of the run-up to Storth is well on the way, with all the major landowners being very helpful and supportive. They all have various obstacles and hurdles to overcome (gas lines, electricity cables, sewers, field drains, etc) and, as we are also new to this, it gets delayed whilst we ask B4RN for help and advice. We have several wayleaves agreed, with others still being sorted, and at present everything is progressing as we would wish."