Cumbria and Lancashire Education Online (Cleo) - using £3.5m-worth of grants from the Department for Education and Skills, the Cleo Regional Broadband Consortium has built its own wireless and DSL infrastructure to provide local schools with 10mb/s for a fraction of the price it would cost from a commercial supplier. Cleo is now aiming to sell off excess bandwidth to local businesses - it has a contract to supply the region's libraries, is tendering for the council's wide area network and has its first private customer in a small business in Penrith.

Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council - Tameside is the most e-enabled local authority in the country: it is committed to delivering all 767 of its services electronically by 2003, two years ahead of the government target, and about 80 per cent are already available. The key to Tameside's success has been business re-engineering - scrapping individual departments in favour of service units.

York NHS Trust - The trust's IP telephony project will make clinical software available on Compaq iPaq handhelds over the hospital's wireless local area network so doctors can access test results, clinical letters such as referrals and ultimately electronic patient records from the bedside. The second phase of the project, which should be complete by the end of the year, is to implement voice-over-IP software so the handhelds also work as telephones. The devices will be used by all 200 staff.

Cheshire Police - The force's multi-million pound Covert Operation IT project, due to go live in 2003, will help boost efficiency and streamline the processing of intelligence information, keeping track of informers and authorisation of undercover operations.