The Connected Communities (ConCom) service – which is funded by HIE, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, the Scottish Government and the European Regional Development Fund – was first conceived in 2002 and due to be completed in 2003. At that time, it was thought that the project would cost £1.5m.

ConCom currently has 930 customers, which leaves the company with a public-purse subsidy of £8,575 per household.

HIE admits that an initial ConCom grant of £5.15m was approved in 2003 and supplemented in 2007 with an additional £1.2m for hard to reach areas.

However, before today, the enterprise body had not included additional funding figures of £1.1m Pathfinder funding approved in 2007 to increase bandwidth to schools and council offices, or the £400,000 put aside by Comhairle nan Eilean Siar as running costs for the project.

Residents of Northbay in Barra have sent more than 1,000 letters to HIE expressing anger over the enterprise body's decision to continue with ConCom, rather than accept the community's request to upgrade the BT exchange.

George MacLeod of Northbay has found mention within HIE papers of a £1.6m 'seven-year rolled up revenue grant', as well as an agreement from HIE, the Comhairle and the Western Isles Health Board to pledge another £150,000 each, which would bring the total subsidy to just over £10m. HIE admits that these figures were mooted, but says that they have not gone ahead.

Members of the community in Northbay say that advances in ADSL technology have rendered ConCom a substandard service, providing only one megabyte per second (mbps) download speed as opposed to the four mbps available with landline broadband.

Many of those who use the service also claim it is unreliable, often cutting out or simply not working.

ConCom however claims that wireless is better than land-based broadband, because it allows customers to download and upload at the same rate. "It is not a mass-market broadband product, and therefore cannot be compared to products which are available from the large Internet Service Providers," said a ConCom spokesman, in conversation with the 'Gazette' earlier this year.

Barra residents however say that upload speed is not an issue, and that they would rather have access to the several companies that provide ADSL broadband for around £15 a month than pay £25 for ConCom.

"If you are doing something important on dial-up, it may take two hours but at least you will get it done," said Northbay's George MacLeod. "Wireless does not work here. BT trialled it years ago and said it was expensive, cumbersome and bound to fail. But the BT offering (of landline broadband) has come on by leaps and bounds."

Mr MacLeod added that BT was given £16.5m by the Scottish Government in 2002 to upgrade 378 rural exchanges –£40,000 per exchange. But 21 Western Isles exchanges were left out of this funding package, as the government had already allocated £5.6m to Connected Communities. Northbay is still waiting for its ConCom mast, and residents say it will cost a great deal more than £40,000.

"If the government had given BT £1m they could have upgraded all of the exchanges in the Western Isles," said George MacLeod. "By last year, it had become apparent that the ConCom business plan had gone wrong. The easy option, the cheap option, is now turning out to be upgraded BT exchanges.

"I would like to see that the HIE board members take a personal interest and audit the claims of the management group. The scheme that they are trying to provide does not work."

"They are treating the opinions of the people with the contempt you would expect from a third world regime," added Northbay's Neil MacNeil. "This is taxpayers' money we are talking about.

"When we met with HIE in March we presented them with a petition signed by 90% of the households affected, saying they would be willing to wait for the service we want, rather than have one we don't want forced upon us sooner.

"It was clear what people wanted," added Mr MacNeil. "If they think that ignoring us will help, they are wrong. We are not going away."