Business case studies
Atlantic FM
Atlantic FM is a commercial radio station covering the whole of Cornwall, from its base on the North Cornwall Atlantic coast. It was awarded its license in 2006 and has been attracting a growing audience ever since, with over 70,000 listeners tuning in every week.
Lightning fast speeds
Tim Ley, Operations Controller, says: “We have recently connected to superfast broadband and it is fantastic. We are getting speeds of 30 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. This is helping us enormously on a day to day level as the team are now saving a huge amount of time sending and receiving audio files by email. Superfast also opens up all kinds of new and exciting possibilities for future developments, so we can provide a better and more interactive experience to our listeners.”
Tim continues: “Most music now arrives from producers and music companies as digital files. These are CD quality so they are very large files indeed – they can be up to 150 Mb. It used to take up to a full minute to download each of these audio files whereas now they can be downloaded in an instant. As well as music, we also regularly send and receive radio commercials to and from external production companies and again, these are very large files, so it is great that this can now happen at lightning fast speeds.
Trialling new technologies
“Superfast means we are now starting to test high definition audio streaming and we are right at the vanguard as one of the very first local radio stations in the UK to trial this new technology. As more and more people have high bandwidth capability on their own internet connections, we want to be able to deliver an audio stream which is crystal clear and the highest quality it can possibly be. We are testing a number of different ways of doing this, none of which would have been possible without superfast broadband.
“Superfast has also been the springboard for developing a brand new iPhone and iPad application for Atlantic FM. This will have synergy with whatever is on the radio station, so it will lead to a more interactive experience for the listener. As we will update the app frequently and it will include bandwidth-heavy graphics, this really only becomes realistically achievable with superfast broadband. In this way, superfast will help us deliver more interactivity and a richer experience to our audience.
Increasing productivity
“Superfast will also help us run the business in ways that are more streamlined, increasing productivity and saving us time and money. For example, it will now be far easier for our team to work from home and on the move, connecting remotely to our virtual private network. The network will be more robust and faster now that it is powered by superfast. We have a team of six sales staff covering the whole of Cornwall, so it is vital that we can enable effective mobile and remote working.
New world of cloud computing
“Cloud computing is another exciting new world which opens up to us now that we have superfast broadband. We are looking at a whole raft of ways we can use cloud computing both to improve our business operations and improve the customer experience. Online backup is just one area where the cloud is likely to transform the way we operate. As you can imagine, we have tens of thousands of very large audio files, currently on three servers, and the sheer scale of our data presents a challenge in relation to backup which we can now look at addressing in new and more efficient ways in future.
“It may be that cloud computing also opens up new opportunities in relation to the way we transmit audio to customers online. It is fantastic to be able to pioneer new ways of delivering a better service to customers. Superfast broadband has expanded what we can do and put us at the forefront of technological development within the radio industry.”
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