All fibres great and small

Westmorland Veterinary Group provides veterinary care for pets and farm animals from its practice in Cumbria, operating with 39 members of staff across two sites; one in Kirkby Lonsdale and the other in Kendal.

At the Kirkby Lonsdale site, the practice had been used to broadband speeds of just 10 megabits per second (Mbps) or worse, which, when sharing data with their other site across a team of 25 vets and qualified nurses and an administration team of 14 people meant a lot of waiting around for files to download.

Working with B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North Ltd) Ben Sapsford, Practice Director, installed a full fibre connection using a gigabit voucher and now enjoys a download speed 1,000 Mbps (1 gigabit) for no more additional cost each month.

Ben commented: “Before our fibre connection we twiddled our thumbs a lot while we waited for things to download. This was frustrating staff, reducing our efficiency and impacting our ability to deliver excellent customer service. Now we are able to share and store large data files such as animal X-rays easily and work at high speed with Cloud-based software. We also have easy access to the online records that we have to complete for TB testing and other specialist software to back-up our critical data every few minutes. This has also transformed the ease at which staff can work remotely.”