Business case studies
UKNetWeb
UKNetWeb is a technical web development company with offices in a converted engine house at Wheal Kitty, within a stone's throw of the ocean at St Agnes. With 7 staff, the company provides high quality web software solutions for a wide range of clients, including some across Europe and further afield. UKNetWeb is one of the first in the UK to benefit from superfast broadband download speeds of 100Mbps.
Managing Director Toby Parkins says: "Superfast broadband has taken us into the super league.
"We now have broadband speeds that outperform most of our clients in London. It is fantastic to be in a position where our London clients are saying to us 'Wow! You are so lucky!' Having superfast broadband has had a powerful impact on perceptions about our company and means we are seen as serious world class players. One of our clients is one of the largest telecoms companies in the world. They are of course used to top notch speeds and they see us as now part of the super league."
UKNetWeb is one of the first businesses in Cornwall to benefit from the cutting edge 'fibre to the premises' technology, which provides the very fastest broadband speeds available in the UK.
Toby says: "One of the most striking things you notice is that you can have nine or ten of us in the office, all busy online and all with quite incredible broadband speeds."
Impact on productivity
"This has had quite an impact on the way we work and what we can offer our clients. Of course, it saves us loads of time on particular tasks, especially where we are transferring very large amounts of data, as we are for many of the highly sophisticated eCommerce sites we develop. When we are synchronising websites, a task that might have taken an hour will now take 5 minutes, so the impact on productivity is phenomenal.
"Now we have superfast, we can take collaborative work with clients to the next level. For example, we now offer a new service to clients whereby they can log into our repository archive systems to check out software codes. Previously, if there were conflicts in codes, they would have needed to be checked manually, so the new collaborative system is far more effective and saves a huge amount of time."
More effective collaboration
Toby continues: "More effective collaboration is one of the big wins from superfast. For example, we carry out regular review meetings with all our clients and now we can make these meetings more effective through using a shared desktop for remote meetings, combined with video conferencing on Skype. These meetings include a large number of people in different locations, yet we are all looking at the same screen and can talk face to face. The quality of the video and the synchronisation is brilliant now we have superfast broadband! This makes the meetings so much more productive.
"Another area where the quality of collaboration has improved is that our clients can now look at our test and development servers without experiencing any delay at all, so they enjoy a far better experience. This is the kind of customer advantage that all adds up to give us a real competitive edge.
"I also have a superfast broadband connection at home and it is seamless to access office files and dial into the remote desktop. It is just as if I am in the office on the same network. So I can work 24/7 when necessary to deal with any urgent issues or talk to clients in different time zones."
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