The funding will help seven businesses based at Valley Court Offices in Croydon. The small businesses and landlord applied together to pool the funding from the Government’s connection voucher scheme.
Connection vouchers are currently on offer from Connecting Cambridgeshire’s Destination Digital project. The vouchers provide small businesses in Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire with funding up to £3000 per company to install superfast broadband.
The Croydon businesses will use the Government funding to install their own dedicated broadband leased line, providing speeds of over 30Mbps.
Metechno, based at Valley Court, produce prefabricated bathrooms and the slow connection was making it difficult to transfer large files to their factory in Alfreton.
Nicola Roope, Director of Metechno, said: “The additional speed will benefit the transfer of our design files. If the funding wasn’t available, we would have had to wait until the business was more established.”
Granite 5 is a web design company with 11 members of staff based at Valley Court. They use a range of cloud-based software and encourage their staff to work from home, but their current slow connection was causing problems.
Jill Davies, Director of Granite 5, said: “Through the new connection, we will become more efficient and hopefully that will show in our work and eventually profit margin. In the long term, it will help us to grow the business and enable us to take on more staff. I would recommend it to companies, especially in business parks, as you can club together and share the costs. It would have been too expensive to do this by ourselves.”
She added: “The application process was incredibly easy – the supplier, landlord and the team at Destination Digital helped.”
The landlord of Valley Court, James Brown encouraged his tenants to apply to the connection voucher scheme and pool the funding together. He said: “The benefits of the connection voucher scheme for Valley Court were obvious. It will be easier for us to attract new tenants with higher speeds and give us the edge on competitors”.
Small businesses, sole traders and charities based in Cambridge and the surrounding area can apply to Destination Digital to get a connection voucher until March 2015.
For further information and to apply, visit: www.destinationdigital.info