Vox Pop: Is the UK's broadband infrastructure "fit for purpose"?

For your perspective, how important is access to affordable high-speed broadband and have you ever experienced problems in securing the affordable broadband provision you need to keep your agency growing?

John Ryder, operations director, Silverbean -

We’ve always needed access to high-speed, reliable broadband and even more so now that much of our infrastructure is cloud based. We need a consistent service to access many of the tools, platforms and information we use to optimise digital performance for our clients.

We’ll be ready to move to new premises in the next twelve months in order to maintain our growth and I’m expecting to be limited by choice of services that will enable us to retain the level of speed and service we have at the moment. It’s perplexing that providers can offer homes across the country a super-fast connection, yet so many businesses have to make do with a less than ideal service or pay hefty costs, despite their being a much greater need for it.

An initiative recently commissioned in Northumberland will ensure that 95% of homes and businesses receive access to fibre-optic broadband services by the end of 2015, so it would be fantastic to see something similar rolled out across the UK, sooner rather than later.

James Greenwood, digital director, Strawberry -

Our connection is of paramount importance - if yours isn’t to you then you’re doing it wrong! However, the bit people forget about is the “up” part of the connection. We want to shift data quickly as well as backing up lots of data so a quick connection in both directions is key for us.

We’re lucky here in Hull though. We’ve our own internet provider, Kingston Communications, and they’re in the middle of a fibre rollout across the city. We paid a small fee and jumped the queue and the difference it has made having dedicated fibre into our offices is unbelievable. File transfers are done in seconds and its reliability has allowed us to put a proper VPN in place too. In fact, we often forget that not everyone has the same sort of connection as we do!

Hull is making great strides in the digital sector - watch out world, the “Digital Humber” is coming to get you!

Saman Mansourpour, managing director, The Agency -

We find that our broadband service is akin to a pair of tight fitting trousers, where every time we loosen a notch on our belt we find we've eaten another Christmas pudding. Being a slave to new tech, moving most of our services to the Cloud and preaching an outsource culture we find that it is very often our broadband service that let's it all down, and that's with the Gold service. It’s particularly frustrating when all the other aspects of our IT work so effectively. We estimated that we probably spend 10% of our total IT budget trying to accommodate broadband contention issues and all out service downtime.

So in short, no, broadband services currently are not sufficient to take us much further into the 21st Century, particularly in Bath. And with the pace of consumer demand the government plans and supporting growth funds look like they may fall short. But as with the general pace of tech, how do we know what "fit for purpose" is really going to look like in two years time?