Major announcements at Milestone Event

Superfast Rural Internet provider Wessex Internet uses its Milestone event held at The Grosvenor Arms Shaftesbury to make major announcements to its customers and potential customers in its operating area of North Dorset, South Wiltshire and East Somerset.

At the reception for 120 customers, partners and staff held in The Assembly Room of The Grosvenor Arms Shaftesbury, they that the 1000th Wessex Internet customer is Helen Lawes of Chettle, who by chance, managed to secure £800 value of free internet connection and service. Local MP Simon Hoare presented the award to Helen who is a Local Hospital matron, and lives with her family in Chettle.

Simon is Vice Chairman of the all-party broadband committee and he spoke about government appreciating the need for better speeds for those who live and work in the countryside. More will be done to help the likes of Wessex Internet expand into not spot areas and he was delighted to announce that the Dorset Superfast Scheme administrators had been successful in securing BDUK approval to allow businesses and residents who get less than 2Mb/s internet to receive a £350 connection grant and Wessex Internet’s new customers can qualify for this scheme. Wessex Internet says, “This will be great news to help us serve more remote areas and potential customers where we already have a presence where BT speeds are slow.”

Technical Director Matthew Skipsey announced that the project to redesign a new Wessex Internet website from the ground up is now complete. The new website is now live and it integrates with all of the firm’s management portals so that new customers can easily confirm a superfast service is available, chose a deal, enter their details and organise an installation. The site works well for PC, Tablet and smart phone users with the next generation design.

Matthew also explained that we had decided it was a good time to offer our customers a bigger data allowance for no increase in cost. The top Family + package now comes with a massive 500GB of data and the middle popular Family package is now 150GB. Plus we’ve added up to 25% more data for Residential Starter and business broadband customers. He explains “we want to pass on improved economies of scale for our growing customer base and we’ve taken advantage of our recent direct connections to the main content providers like Google, Netflix and the BBC which reduces our own costs and means we can pass on the benefit to customers.”

James Gibson Fleming who is responsible for the infrastructure growth said “we have plans to move into 7 new areas in the near future with agreement underway for sites at Henstridge and Cucklington covering many badly served homes and businesses. We expect our service will have a significantly increased footprint by this time next year and with the new website we could well be past 1750 customers by the end of 2016.”

Wessex Internet is again entering the Internet Service Provider Awards hoping to build on last years finalist status achieved for 3 categories. The business is encouraging its customers to prove their superfast internet speeds which form part of the judging criteria.