Ian first got in touch with the Superfast South Yorkshire team in May 2020 to see when their premises would be fibre enabled. They registered with us to be notified when their property had FTTP (Fibre to the premises) available
What was your broadband like before fibre broadband was available?
We had two "copper" broadband lines giving us about 3Mbps! We combined that with a 4G router to give us about 15 meg on a good day. We had previously had good broadband through the Digital Region project. However, when that was removed we ended up with painfully slow speeds from 2014.
What do you use your broadband for and how were these uses impacted by your ‘poor’ broadband?
We are mainly a mail order company so lots of emails going back and forth and websites being updated etc. As part of our daily operations we run hourly reports on our point of sale system to update orders as completed and to amend stock levels etc. Our point of sale system suppliers offer remote support and they have struggled to log on remotely to resolve problems. This would often time out due to the slow broadband speeds. We use several different courier companies and most of their back ends are web based so there would be a lot of standing around waiting for pages to update which is not best use of staffs time. Overall this meant simple tasks were taking a lot longer than they should and having an impact on the productivity and efficiency of our business.
Additionally, we have a CCTV and security system that are ran over the internet and due to the slow speeds we could not use the remote app to check the cameras if an alarm had been triggered.
Some members of staff work from home part time they can struggle to log on remotely due to the slow speeds at the business premises.
What is your business?
We are MB Scooters, we make and sell parts for classic scooters, mainly Lambrettas. We also do performance and development work. The company is made up of six employees, the managing director, sales manager, general manager (Ian), order processor and two assistants. We are all cross-trained so we can all do a lot of each others roles to keep things going during annual leave etc. Having efficient systems is key to being successful when running a business with a small team.
We asked Ian if there was anything they wanted to do but couldn’t because of the poor broadband available. Here is what he had to say,
Not really. Broadband should really be something invisible that you don't really notice - you just get on with what you need to do. Before we had full fibre it felt like we were spinning plates keeping all the connections going.
What is the best thing about having full fibre?
It just works! It's stable and gives us great speeds downloading and uploading stuff. The dispatch guy reckons he spent up to an hour a day waiting for sites to load.
This is a great example of how fast and reliable broadband can make a difference to businesses in a range of different ways. Fibre broadband has made a huge difference to the productivity of one member of staff in this case.
1 hour a day = 5hrs per week
5hrs per week= 20hrs per month
20hrs per month =240hrs per year
240hrs per year is over £2000 per year in staff wages waiting for websites to load.
How has having ultrafast broadband helped to boost productivity/business – any standout examples?
The big thing is the dispatch guy really but everyone can now just get on with things.
What things can you do now with your business – that you couldn’t do before.
We are now able to create a secure online back up of our systems should anything go wrong, before it would have taken too much time and effort to do so. Most importantly we are now able to get on with our day to day business and focus on growing our offer without worrying about the limitations of our broadband.
Do you find your connection doesn’t drop out and everything like downloading music, videos, big files is much quicker?
Yes, the big thing is the files uploading to update the websites, that hasn't had a problem since we got full fibre.
