Chris Durman and his family of five, plus pets, have lived in Mayfield for 16 years, having moved down from London in the pre-Broadband era, and were the first to sign-up for upgraded broadband services in the village following their Cabinet going live.

As a modern connected family they have multiple devices, around 15 of them all vying for bandwidth. At the last count Chris reports the family having 5 iphones,  6 personal laptops, 1 work laptop (as Chris works from home a couple of days per week) , 2 ipads, and apple tv box & internet TV.

Since their upgrade, the family have noticed a huge difference in connectivity. They no longer suffer from buffering issues when several of them are streaming concurrently on different devices. Upload speed is where they’ve really seen a huge difference. Uploading large files used to take hours, but now this take minutes. Even Rose the dog, who has her own Facebook page to maintain, can now do this with ease! 

The household mostly stream tv programmes (broadcast tv accounting for only around 20% of their viewing, and mainly for news/current affairs) through BBC iplayer, Netflix, Apple TV and Amazon Prime.  They used to do this before they had high speed broadband which usually ended up with a lot of contention -and  not just between the devices! With high speed broadband the family now enjoy virtually break free streaming and a much more relaxed household.

Chris works from home 2-3 days a week with a heavy reliance on a good broadband connection for emails, live meeting and teleconferencing. He’s noticed a marked improvement in download speeds especially for live meetings when sharing presentations.   He will also use Voice over IP which will cut down on his telephone bills.  Chris reported that he has noticed that during peak times his connection might slow but he still gets enough throughput to be productive, whereas pre-high speed broadband the connection speed would drop down to an unusably low speed.

The three children of the family – 2 working and 1 at university use technology mostly for leisure: streaming , Facebook, gaming - multi tasking across multiple device eg watching a film on Netflix whilst Facebooking on the mobile!

Jack & Nat run a production company producing promotional films - they get a lot of work from Universities who like to have promo films for their websites. A lot of time was wasted uploading their work for client review.  Now with high speed broadband the films upload in minutes rather than hours, meaning their turnaround time is dramatically reduced.

As time has gone on Chris says "we started to see the divide between Urban and Non -Urban areas in delivery of High speed internet. I had resigned myself to slow download and impossibly slow uploads in favour of living in such beautiful countryside. However now I have both thanks to eSussex"