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Launched last summer by the Welsh Government, the Broadband Support Scheme offers help in areas where broadband connection speeds remain low because they are too remote from telephone exchanges.

Anyone in a so-called "not-spot", where connectivity is unable to sustain the most basic broadband, can apply for a grant of up to £1,000 to replace their dial-up connection with the most appropriate technology available.

As of the end of May this year, the Broadband Support Scheme had approved 800 applications, unlocking £600,000 worth of grants from the original pot of £2 million.

But Eye on Wales understands that the Welsh Government is to extend the scheme to include broadband "slow-spots" - giving a lot more people the chance to apply for the funding.

The news is likely to be welcomed by the likes of John Snowden in the North Pembrokeshire community of Cilgerran, which is too far from the telephone exchange at Cardigan to benefit from its high-speed fibre optic cables.

As a result some residents remain on dial-up connections and others have such low broadband speeds that they can't use popular internets sites such as the ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer and YouTube.

So for the past few years, as administrator of village website, John Snowden has been co-ordinating efforts to find an alternative solution.

Although the Broadband Support Scheme currently offers some help, he found that its "speed limit" of 512kbps put a brake on his efforts to sign enough people up to make the favoured wireless solution viable.

"There are some in the village that will be marginally over the top of 512kbps and may not qualify for the money, which is a real handicap because we need a reasonable number of people to come on to the scheme to make it worth while"

"But as it stands at the moment if they get more than 512kbps then they will not qualify for the grant money for the installation, so they'll have to spend up to £1,000 themselves for the installation. That's a real drawback."

The Welsh Government's expected announcement on raising the Broadband Support Scheme's "speed limit" to 2 megabits per second would do away with that drawback.

And that would open the door for Cilgerran and other communities to follow the example of Treleddyd Fawr on the St David's peninsula in Pembrokeshire.

In January of this year it became the first community scheme to successfully apply to the Broadband Support Scheme, with individual applicants pooling their grants to buy in a wireless solution from Neyland-based communications company TFL.

The company's founder, Alan England, believes that the scheme - which delivers download speeds up to 10 megabits per second for a monthly payment of £20 - could serve as a blueprint for the rest of rural Wales.

"Eighty per cent of the people here are running small rural businesses and it's very frustrating if you haven't got broadband."

"They were getting miniscule connections, dial-up speeds. We've brought them in connections far in excess of anything they can get this side of Swansea."

"This is the role model for everywhere - it's been so easy to do. It's been a simple exercise - very fruitful for everyone concerned."

TFL's clients around Treleddyd Fawr now include the RNLI lifeboat station at near-by St Justinians, Shalom House hospice in St David's itself and artist Jackie Morris, who can see the wireless relay mast from her studio.

Her new high-speed internet connection has transformed her working life.

"It was affecting my business. I struggled along as best I could on a dial-up connection but I can do so much more now."

"As an artist you have to blog, you have to have Facebook, you have to get your work out to as many people as possible."

"I was finding that more and more of my time was spent trying to up-load photos. You'd get half-way through then the dial-up connection dropped."

"So much time was wasted trying to work on the internet, less time at the drawing board, which is where I like to be most."