Background
Arable farmer, Andrew Williamson, lives on a 900-acre family farm a mile outside Middleton Scriven, with wife Caroline and three children. Middleton Scriven is a small rural village six miles south of Bridgnorth. Andrew’s family have been farming here since 1944, growing a range of cereal crops including wheat, barley, oilseed rape and oats.
During the last decade, Andrew has invested in a range of innovative agri-tech, which requires a reliable superfast broadband connection and strong wifi to integrate most effectively and provide optimum efficiency in an ever developing agri-tech sector.
The Challenge
The Williamsons have struggled with poor broadband for many years which created lots of challenges for all the family and for the agri-tech systems that make the farm run more efficiently. Slow broadband was a source of frustration since the family needed it for everything from emails and internet banking to mapping field data for spraying and fertilising. Andrew also needed to use the internet for the farming business to submit VAT returns online.
“We had a very slow broadband connection of around 1Mbps – even general internet browsing was difficult. Watching a three minute clip on Youtube would take about 15 minutes.”
By 2020 we have to be able to submit quarterly accounts online. We do all our applications for grants, subsidies BPS (basic payment scheme), payments online. The galling thing is that BT fibre went past the end of our drive but we are 3.5 miles from the exchange.
“We registered interest as soon as we heard about it and I rang up to see if it would work for us. Airband sent out an engineer to see if it was a viable solution for us and it was. Airband engineers returned within a fortnight to install the service. The engineers arrived by 9am and installed the receiver on the house and wired it into the router provided. By lunchtime we were up and running.”
Andrew was aware of the Connecting Shropshire programme and found out that rural broadband specialists Airband were delivering superfast broadband access within his area.
The Solution
“We are delighted with the service we are getting. Having Superfast broadband means we can do the things everyone else takes for granted. It makes our lives a lot easier and I can’t imagine being without it now.
“I use software applications to spread seed, fertilisers and sprays at a ‘variable rate’ in the fields. Generally I create a map, which I then transfer to the tractor using a USB stick. Now that I have better broadband connectivity at the farm, my next objective is to improve my mobile phone connectivity.
“Also, now that I have better broadband and a stronger wifi signal I am looking to create a wifi hotspot in the farmyard which will upload data from the tractor into the farm software as soon as it comes back from the field into the farmyard.”
Having an Airband superfast broadband connection means that I can quickly and easily sort out online farming admin and it also adds social options that we have never had access to before. We can watch films without any buffering. It’s a very reliable and robust service. It has been a very positive experience to date and on the times I have had to contact Airband they have responded very quickly.
Andrew has Airband’s Superfast HomePlus packaged, which offers 30Mbps download, 2Mbps upload and unlimited data.
For more information and to see how Airband can help you, use our broadband coverage checker to check coverage and find out more about the packages available.
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