A Rural Business and winner of the 2008 Queens Award for Enterprise
Little Maplestead is less than 70 km from the centre of London, less than 20km from Colchester and about 2km from the towns of Halstead and Sudbury.This quiet little hamlet in north Essex is the home to one of the UK’s leading international music companies. Audio Network won the Queens Award for Enterprise in 2008 and now has offices all around the world including London, Sydney and New York, but it was born and remains, at least in part, tucked away between Halstead and Sudbury in the village of Little Maplestead.
Audio Network records music for the international television and film industries. There are 250 composers writing for the company and it releases up to 10,000 tracks a year. Each track is emailed to the music team in Maplestead for checking and mastering and then uploaded to the company’s website at www.audionetwork.com . As the company also has 35 members of staff there is considerable demand for constant and reliable internet and email connection.
“Originally we set up in a barn in North Essex to keep costs down,” says Audio Network Managing Director, Andrew Sunnucks. “We always planned to move the whole company to London, but were saved by high-speed internet access delivered by County Broadband. This allows us to upload and download music to our heart’s content and Maplestead remains the head of our customer service operation.”
“In the early days it was extremely frustrating,” says Sunnucks, “the connection was like a bit of wet string and it was impossible to get anything like a reliable service. The fact that with County Broadband we have at last got a consistently reliable service has safeguarded a number of local jobs and gives us all a spectacularly beautiful place to work. I can’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be able to carry on working in this region for the foreseeable future”.
Following initial investigations, County Broadband were able to supply a dedicated wireless link providing a lease-line equivalent service capable of upload and download speeds in excess of 10Mb. While the company are still to call on the full potential of the upload and download speeds available to them, the current service provided has made a significant difference to Audio Networks ability to support remote workers using VPN connections and to transfer files between offices, composers and customers.
