Focus on Fibre: Crimson Guitars

One of our newest Full Fibre customers is Crimson Guitars. For years they had been struggling with desperately slow internet speeds. Armed with a Gigabit Voucher from the Department of Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) to cover their installation costs, Wessex Internet increased the speed of their connection tenfold, and did it all in 6 weeks, from start to finish!

Situated up a long track, a short drive from the centre of Piddlehinton, on top of a hill surrounded by rolling countryside I find a musical craftsman’s workshop – meeting Ben Crowe, the founder of Crimson Guitars, you can feel his passion for handmade, bespoke designed guitars, it’s infectious. Ben started Crimson Guitars in 2005, after years building in his own garage. Today Crimson numbers 15 employees, hand creating around 100 guitars a year, sticking very much to the handmade ethos of Ben’s original concept.

As with most if not all businesses these days, Crimson Guitars online presence is crucial to them – an online showcase of all their beautifully crafted instruments, coupled with an online shop with which to make your purchase is only the start – with a business that not only focuses on building guitars, but also training eager students on how to build their own guitars, Crimson Guitars have amassed a mind blowing 115,000 YouTube subscribers over the past 6 years.

Their YouTube channel centres around detailed tutorials; 3 to 4 per week, filmed in full HD quality and varying between 10 and 30 minutes long – their speed with BT speed offering was at best around 13Mb/s down, but their 0.2Mb/s up was the real killer – full HD video takes a very long time to upload at that speed!

They had originally approached us in November 2017 to see if we could provide them with our superfast wireless broadband, however, they were just out of reach of our masts. Just a few months later though, with the government’s Gigabit Voucher scheme underway, in May this year they were approved for installation funding. Straight away, we set about channelling our fibre optic cables over the landscape between Cheselbourne and their workshop. BT had previously informed Crimson Guitars that they could be upgraded to their own fibre network by 2022 – only 4 years away! We connected them around 6 weeks after their funding was approved!

They have now been “up and running” for about a month, and both Ben and James Blackburn (Managing Director) say that it has made a massive difference to their working day. Videos that historically took several hours to upload are ready to go in a few minutes. Not only that, when the videos are being uploaded, everyone else can still be productive online! The next step they say is to trial live streaming, something totally unimaginable before.

You can check out Crimson Guitar’s website here: www.crimsonguitars.com or you can subscribe to their YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/CrimsonCustomGuitars – keep an eye out for their first live streams (courtesy of Wessex Internet’s ultrafast full fibre)!

If you’re interested in getting Full Fibre to your home or business, then register your interest here and we will keep you informed of our