Callestick Farm

Nestled in a valley close to the North Cornwall coast, Callestick Farm has been farmed by the Parker family for over 60 years. They make award-winning Cornish ice cream to the original family recipe, with free range milk from their grass-fed herd of cattle. As well as supplying trade customers across the UK, Callestick Farm is a popular visitor attraction, with a tea shop on site.

Operations Director Ben Parker says: “We are thrilled to now have a ‘Fibre to the Premises’ superfast broadband connection. This transforms the way we can operate and opens up a range of new opportunities we simply could not consider before.”

With a very slow internet connection of around 1 Mbps two years ago Callestick Farm invested in a 4G router to achieve a faster broadband connection. Ben explains: “Although 4G delivered superfast speeds, the service was capped. This was inconvenient and it hampered what we could do. As a result, we put several plans on ice and could not develop the business operations in the way we ideally wanted to.”

Ben continues: “Now we have a ‘Fibre to the Premises’ connection, we can rely on an unlimited fast connection. This brings a great number of benefits to the business. Firstly, it means it is so much easier to upload high resolution photos and videos to our website and social media channels. Marketing is at the heart of our business and now we can really make the most of the internet to reach out to customers and engage with them.

“Everyday emailing, internet banking and online research is also so much faster and this all adds up, saving us time and increasing productivity.

“However, the key benefit is that we will now be able to use the cloud and cloud- based applications within our business operations. For example, we can now start using Skype for face to face communications with some of our trade customers, now that we can rely on a crystal- clear connection. This should help us build still closer relationships with customers and will also remove the need for travel to some meetings, so this will bring cost and time savings as well. It will be especially useful to us in our communications with our new customers in China, where we have recently won a substantial contract.

“We are also now exploring new avenues, such as creating a new online app for customer orders. Customer orders are made online and it will be a huge benefit for this process to be faster and more streamlined for customers. This kind of innovation is likely to increase our competitiveness. We could simply not have considered an online development of this kind without reliable, unlimited superfast.

“Another possibility which is now open to us, thanks to the superfast connection, is moving across to VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) for our telephony system. Again, this is likely to lead to significant cost savings for the business.”

Ben concludes: “Superfast broadband is enabling us to transform the way we operate the business, creating exciting new opportunities which are likely to lead to business growth.”