Propeller Marketing, Old Dalby
Propeller Marketing was established ten years ago in Old Dalby, a small village in rural Leicestershire. The specialist membership marketing company focusses on building and retaining members for its broad range of national clients. With communication playing a vital role in running an effective business, we spoke to Director, Melanie Sallis, about her experience of moving to Superfast Broadband.:
What were the challenges before you upgraded?
Even though I live less than a mile from the A46 and only 15 miles from Nottingham or Leicester I had no mobile connection and although not quite as bad as dial up, the old internet connection was the slowest of the slow. Simple tasks such as sharing files and talking over the internet was something we weren’t able to do effectively.
The connection would keep dropping out, programmes would crash and reliability was a big issue for us. I’d moved to cloud storage and it took me five days just to upload my data.
How easily did you get upgraded?
About 2 years ago I approached our local county councillor and he looked into it for me. He has made
sure this area became a priority and has been on the case ever since. High fibre broadband eventually arrived in Old Dalby about a month ago and once it was here it was a really straightforward process to upgrade.
What difference has fibre broadband made?
It makes our client communications so much easier as I can access teleconferencing, Skype or Google
Hangouts; I just couldn’t use these platforms before.
The faster speeds mean file sharing is more effective and uploading to the cloud is much quicker.
I also feel confident that I could expand the business into Europe. I’m much more comfortable face to face than simply talking over the phone and the technology and faster connection allow me do that easily outside the UK.
Now I have a decent broadband connection I can use VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol), I use my mobile over wifi and I’ll be able to save on a separate business line. In the long term it will be more cost effective.