Streaming music with Full Fibre broadband

My name is Cenzo Townshend, we're at Decoy Studios in Suffolk. The business has been here for about ten years. I grew up in Suffolk, so as soon as I could get out of London, I moved back here and we found this spot, which is a beautiful spot outside Woodbridge. 

So, we moved here around 2010. Set the studio up, I'm a mixer so I can mix anywhere as long as I have the correct connectivity and speed to be able to receive files. The challenge that we faced when we first came here was the internet connection speed was pretty low. And within a few years of us being here, it actually became a lot slower. We have to download typically 30 to 40 gigabytes at a time and we upload double that sometimes.

So, it was causing a big problem for our business, and we were in the middle of trying to finish a very important album and files were being bounced around between here and Los Angeles and London and we got to the point where we couldn't upload any more.

So, when our connection speed was at its lowest, we were having to sit, take a laptop and a hard drive and sit outside buildings that we knew the password for that belonged to friends of mine businesses and whatever, and literally sit there in the middle of the night uploading from the car. We have permission to do that, so it wasn't shady or anything. The odd time some of my assistants would have to go into Woodbridge to sit in the coffee shop and upload the odd file. So whatever way worked, we just had to make it work somehow.

Luckily my request was escalated, and we were able to get a much faster fibre connection very quickly. Within one weekend, by Monday morning, we were up and running and we had 300 megabytes (Mb) from going from literally the day before that we were 8 megabytes (Mb). So, the band, the artists I was here with at the time, were immensely impressed and were able to continue because we had got to the point where they were seriously considering having to move.

I suppose the other thing that is an enormous help is knowing that going forward we have the bandwidth to be able to cope with whatever is thrown at us in terms of being able to move files. Already in the last year surround sound has hit and we have to deliver music in Atmos mixes for Apple, which is basically a surround format and therefore the file sizes are much bigger.

So, you can see that the demand for bigger bandwidth will always be increasing for our business. And I feel now having Full Fibre direct to the premises secures us for the future.