We’re currently trialling Airnet’s new Orange+ VDSL service. We like it so much that I’ve written this case study about it…
We’re a digital marketing and web development business, so we’re always looking for faster broadband speeds. A high-speed connection helps us do our work more easily and quickly, and that translates into better, faster, and more cost-effective projects for our clients. Also, faster broadband makes it easier for us to use services like Skype so when we have free Skype phone calls with our clients, the call quality is higher as a result.
In this job, it’s also really important that you’re using the best software, so we need to make sure that we constantly updating Windows, Office, graphics programs like Photoshop and inDesign, and the latest operating system updates for iPhone and iPad (and of course iTunes). Now that high-speed broadband is becoming the norm overseas, it seems that software applications are getting bigger and bigger. It’s not unheard of to be required to download 500MB files. Even a couple of years ago, this would have been absurd, but with VDSL, it’s no big deal at all. Whereas a couple of years we would need to order a CD if we wanted to buy the latest version of Photoshop, which could take ages to arrive, now with VDSL we just download the software and we’ve got it within half an hour.
If we want make a backups of one of our clients’ websites, it’s really easy to download it straight onto our server. In the past, downloading a site like EIT’s new website, which is 400MB, would have taken all day and slowed everything down for everyone else, but now it’s no problem at all. It only takes half an hour at the very most now.
Another great thing about VDSL is that it allows you to work in the cloud much more easily, but still use the best desktop apps like Outlook to do it. For example, you can sync your Google Mail with Outlook. We keep every email we’ve ever sent or received, and that starts to get pretty massive after a few years. I’ve got 2 gigabytes of email in my Google Mail account. When you first run Google Apps Sync for Outlook, it can take forever just for it to download the first gigabyte of mail into your Outlook so you can start using it. But with VDSL, it only takes a short time before you’re good to go. And if you want to send big files around, applications like Dropbox become very useful indeed.
If you’re thinking about using VDSL, you should definitely do it. Even if you’re not as reliant on the Internet as we are at Mogul – if you’re using email, file sharing, Skype, and cloud services, you would be crazy not to be using the fastest speeds you can get your hands on. It definitely puts you at an advantage over your competitors.
So talk to the team at Airnet today.