30 March 2011
Spectrum Internet Launches ISP Services to Wales
Welsh owned and operated internet service provider Spectrum Internet officially launched yesterday, at an event in Chepstow. Supplying a local broadband and fibre optic service, initially across South East Wales, the first three exchanges to go ‘live’ are located at Chepstow, Cardiff and Newport.
“What this means for Wales is that business owners and residential customers in these areas, can now access best of breed internet access services, from a local company, with the same services and speeds offered by national UK providers,” explains Giles Phelps, Managing Director, Spectrum Internet. “The benefits are that you know where your service comes from, you get local customer service, local engineers who understand the geographical challenges when it comes to access, low contention rates and competitive prices, with speeds and services that match those of much larger providers.”
The first customer to take advantage of the services in Chepstow is Simon Berry-Jones, Managing Director of Office Space Ltd who own and operate Riverside Court, the fully serviced office centre located on the outskirts of the town, overlooking the Severn Bridge.
“By taking up the Spectrum Internet service at the building I can now offer my tenants, who are all small to medium sized enterprises, as much bandwidth as they need, without any heavy investment in infrastructure on their part,” explains Berry-Jones. This is particularly useful for tenants who are setting up a satellite office and need fast and reliable access to a head office, and also those that make use of video conferencing or have off site hosted applications or servers. It also allows tenants to keep down the cost of telephone calls by using VoIP (voice over internet protocol) telephony. The building has become a true ‘gateway to Wales’.”
Phelps adds: “For too long Wales has been left behind when it comes to quality internet access. We have the same business and personal needs as any other region in the UK, when it comes to download speeds and connectivity, and in some cases greater needs when we consider remote working capabilities. But we’ve become complacent about accepting lower quality services. If Wales wants to lead the UK and be an attractive place to do business then we have to raise our expectations of connectivity and service levels. With our network we want to significantly reduce the number of ‘not spots’ across Wales and the opening up of these three exchanges is only just the beginning.”
The multi Gigabit backbone between each of the three exchanges also means large organisations in South Wales can benefit from uncontended fibre optic leased lines, starting from 2Mb, managed from Spectrum’s Cardiff data centre. The ISP will also be able to offer realistic speeds of 20-30 Mbps downloads for residential customers. Further exchanges and expansion plans are in place for the coming months.
Claire Brown, Head of Marketing at Spectrum Internet says: “We won’t be advertising speeds we can’t deliver. Spurred on by recent recommendations from Ofcom, and our own desire to be upfront about our services, we will state the ‘realistic’ or ‘expected’ speeds our customers can achieve, and won’t use terms such as ‘up to’ which can be extremely misleading.”