It was announced yesterday (19^th March 2019) from BT Openreach that Salisbury will be the first city in the country to gain complete access to the new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband technology. 

As part of his support for Openreach’s Fibre First the Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, visited Innovate’s Salisbury Design Studio to see first-hand exactly how the company and our inventor clients will benefit. He was given a guided tour of our design studio, research department and workshops and was accompanied by John Glen MP for Salisbury and Economic Secretary to the Treasury and City Minister.

“The Chancellor of the Exchequer and John Glen understood how Openreach’s full fibre will give us the ability to drive our business forward by enhancing the level of services we are able to offer,” said Alastair, our MD. “Full fibre will allow us to greatly enhance our communication and collaboration with clients through the increased use of high-quality video conferencing.”

Importantly, access to super-fast bandwidth will mean that all of our client managers will be able to participate in virtual meetings without having to leave their desks.

 “Successful virtual meetings speed up the decision-making process to dramatically reduce the all-important time it takes to transform an idea into a prototype product to a fully-fledged invention which its inventor can market. The quicker we can help an inventor market an invention, the quicker the invention can potentially generate income!” said Alastair.

The increased bandwidth Fibre First delivers will allow Innovate Product Design to use video conferencing to present rotating 3D computer-aided design (CAD) virtual prototype designs to clients. This will allow them to view the images from all angles, easily and quickly providing their input, feedback and approval, in real-time.

Another important benefit of Fibre First for Innovate Product Design, and its inventor clients, is that the company will now have access to the greater processing power needed to run the sophisticated engineering software it requires, which will be securely hosted in the cloud.

During his visit to Salisbury the Chancellor of the Exchequer said: “I’m delighted that Salisbury will be the first UK city to gain universal access to the gold-standard of the internet – ultrafast full fibre – making it one of the most cutting-edge cities in the country.”

All of us here at Innovate are looking forward to improving our work times and efficiency as well as maintaining the great relationships we have with our clients.

Alastair concludes: “Fibre First will make a huge difference to Innovate Product Design. It will improve our productivity and efficiency helping our bottom line, provide us with the business tools to forge stronger relationships with our existing inventor clients and help us to grow by delivering the business tools to reach out to those individual inventors, regardless of their location, who are searching for help to make their ‘invention’ a reality,”