Back to News
Ashleigh Contracts have a long-held and well-established reputation of providing high quality projects within the field of civil engineering and in particular on marine civil engineering contracts. A wide spectrum of contracts have been undertaken by the company ranging from coastal defences, dredging, scour protection, underwater demolition, piling, jetty and pontoon installation, general groundworks and pipeline installation as well as a variety of retaining wall structures.
Broadband speeds in the lower Ards Peninsula have been very poor for many years with little sign of any improvement to the rural network services – other than with the offer of dedicated lines at horrendous quoted costs to individual businesses. Their broadband speeds have never exceeded circa 1.5MBps.
To overcome this shortfall in broadband services , they availed of a wireless internet service between 2015 and 2021 before that provider decided to withdraw support for their infrastructure in this area. With wireless internet broadband, they attained download speeds of circa 30MBps, but the service was unreliable and regularly dropped out.
In 2022 they had no option other than to rely on a 4G Sim Router to provide their offices with sufficient broadband coverage, to allow them to access their ever-increasing cloud-based document management systems and for the increasing dependency on adequate broadband to participate in Zoom or MS Teams virtual meetings. This too provided download speeds of circa 30MBps but was also subject to network coverage drop-outs.
With the significant increase in their cloud-based computing services, the needed to access tender documents including large AutoCAD files, the dependency on virtual meetings and the withdrawal of analogue telephone services it was essential for their rural business that they were finally able to connect to the Hyperfast NI Full Fibre Broadband roll out of Project Stratum to Kircubbin which was finally available for them to access in June 2023.
The Fibrus Full Fibre Broadband service has made a dramatic improvement in terms of speed for handling their cloud-based documents, with downloads of circa 280MBps and uploads of 70MBps. This improvement to their communication services has also resulted in them being able to upgrade to a new VoIP telephone system and facilitates a reliable platform to encourage more of their management team to be based at their rural offices rather than having to rely on better broadband being available working-from-home in Bangor and Newtownards.
Since June 2023, their Fibrus connection and network services have been consistent and reliable and have provided a very welcome upgrade on the limited services that were previously available for their business to operate in the rural environment.