Cornwall, like many regions of Britain that once fed the industrial revolution, has had a reversal of fortune. This has been closely linked to the demise of its tin and copper mines and the decline of heavy industry in the area during the last century.

Although perhaps now more noted for tourism, Cornwall is steeped in technology. Think Goonhilly Earth Station, the world's largest satellite centre; think the first transatlantic radio transmission from Cornwall to Newfoundland by Guglielmo Marconi in 1901. Also, think the main data pipe across the Atlantic which hits the Cornish coast before making a beeline for London.

Now, the county is gearing up for the information age, and looking to harness the multitude of small businesses in the region, courtesy of £12.5m from the EU, local government, education and enterprise. Cornwall has established a consortium of local government and business organisations to promote the widespread use of broadband in the county over the next three years.

Actnow Cornwall is a partnership comprising Cornwall Enterprise (lead partner and a wholly owned subsidiary of Cornwall county council), BT, the South West Regional Development Agency (Swerda), Business Link and Cornwall College. Actnow is also the beneficiary of a grant from the EU's Objective One fund.

"When we first looked at this project, the outlook was that Cornwall wasn't going to get any of its businesses connected to broadband in the foreseeable future," says Nigel Ashcroft, actnow's project director. "We are a rural county, with half a million people and thousands of small businesses. We just weren't going to get any funding for this."

Initially, BT was not interested in absorbing the cost and risk of upgrading rural exchanges to service sparse populations, without a substantial contribution from government. In February BT warned that without the government's help rural areas would have to wait for anything up to 20 years for broadband connections.

Since then, though, with the help now available to Cornwall, BT has upgraded eight exchanges in addition to Truro, the only one it was willing to overhaul initially. This will increase to 13 exchanges across the county by 2005. In fact, BT has also promised that nine out of 10 people in Britain will have broadband connections within three years, which would be an advance on the two-thirds of the country currently within reach of a broadband exchange.

Primarily, actnow provides discounted BT ADSL packages to local small and medium-sized businesses, which can claim full rebates on the connection fee as well as around a third off the monthly BT subscription rate for two years, depending on the package.

The project also gives advice and support to businesses for every stage of their online lives, from getting the right broadband package to setting up business-to-business transactions and electronic invoicing.

According to Ashcroft, actnow has signed up 2,077 subscribers in the county since launch in April, of which 600 are SMEs. "Our target figure is 3,200 SMEs by 2005," he says. "At our current sign-up rate, that means we will need to sign up around 10,000 subscribers to hit that target."

In addition, to qualify for the Objective One funding, which amounted to some £5.2m, the actnow project has pledged to create up to 1,000 extra jobs in Cornwall by 2005 from all the broadband activity generated within the county. The level of activity so far has also generated interest from outside the county. Stephen Timms, minister of state for e-commerce and competitiveness, has recently visited the project to assess progress and meet a few of the small businesses now online as a result of actnow.

France TÀlÀcom has also registered an interest in the project, in particular as a working model of rural broadband service provision from one of its European rivals, as has a delegation from Northern Ireland.

Companies that have been attracted to what is on offer include a seven-strong internet marketing agency that relocated from central London to Redruth.

The company, Neutralize, helps companies devise and manage their online marketing campaigns. Most of its work is done remotely and would benefit from as cheap a broadband package as possible. "Using the internet to the extent we do allows us to undercut our competition," says managing director and co-founder Lucy Cokes. "Our pricing model is based on the fact that we don't meet our clients."

Until April, when actnow was established, Neutralize used an ISDN 2E connection, which cost £150 a month. Now, with a BTOpenworld 1000+ 1Mbit ADSL connection, internet access is faster and cheaper at £79.99 (discounted from £119.99). "With broadband, all our software processes are running 10 times faster," says Cokes. "It means we can do certain jobs, like running reports on web positioning (scanning search engines and websites to retrieve data related to clients), which used to take a day, in one hour."

By paying less and being able to do more with broadband, Neutralize is able to increase its profit margins. It also predicts it will double its turnover next year, from £300,000 last year.

With the extra capacity from broadband, there are also plans to add videoconferencing and an extranet website for Neutralize's resellers, adds Teddy Cowell, co-founder and technical director.

"We are redesigning our network at the moment and will soon take more of our software in-house away from our host, which will give us better communication with our resellers," he says.

It is just possible that Cornwall's experiments in broadband will show the rest of the country, and BT in particular, that however remote you are and whatever the local population is, if you build it, they will come.