For the last 14 years, Karen Rennie has been helping people celebrate every kind of occasion with a cake. Her business Encore Cake an Rroll is based in Tyrone but she sells throughout Northern Ireland and farther afield specialising in wedding cakes. “There are a lot of brides who come home to get married so the best way to communicate with them is online normally by email. From day one I need to spend a lot of time online with them to make sure that I deliver exactly what they want. The wedding cake must be perfect on one of the most important days of their lives,” Rennie says.
She operates from premises in Omagh and her home four miles outside of the town where her husband has a dairy farm.
Like many rural business owners Rennie does a lot of her administration work and her emails at her farm house kitchen table and like many other small, rural business owners she faces a daily battle with her broadband connection.
“It is really frustrating because it is so slow and the signal is poor,” she says. “Fast, reliable broadband is vital for my business in 2017 – not only do I need to be able to get in touch with my customers – some of whom live and work very far away – and when I can’t do that my business suffers.
“It is also impacting on my husband because dairy farmers now have to do most of their administration and filing on line and it is very difficult for him to do that too with our current broadband speeds,” Rennie says.
No connection
According to Ofcom – the communications regulator in the UK – 63,000 homes in the North are unable to get a “decent” connection. Its research shows that thousands are unable to sign up for broadband speeds over 10 megabit per second (Mbit/s) – the speed that it estimates is required to meet a typical household’s digital needs.
Ofcom says about 59,000 rural properties in the North do not have a connection of more than 10Mbit/s because they are just too far from the nearest telephone exchange or local street cabinet.
Research shows that Omagh has some of the worst broadband speeds in the UK with some homes and premises with an internet connection not able to get above 2Mbit/s.
Ofcom has said it recognises that consumers and SMEs in rural and remote areas face challenges when it comes to securing broadband services that meet their needs and they are campaigning for these services.
But Rennie believes that rural businesses like hers cannot wait and urgently need intervention to help them otherwise they could lose out on sales to customers who naturally expect them to “be connected”.
She is also the western branch chairman for the Federation of Small Businesses, which has 6,000 members in the North. It says local small firms are disproportionately affected by poor broadband and mobile coverage in comparison to the rest of the UK.
It has found that in some cases there are small businesses in the North that can only access download speeds as little as 0.95Mbits and upload speeds of an “abysmal” 0.40Mbits, according to their service readings.
Cannot compete
Rennie says that speeds like these mean that small businesses like hers simply cannot complete even the simplest tasks online and have to go somewhere else - be it another location or a friend’s house – just to get their work done.
FSB NI says Ofcom needs to get tough and “exercise their statutory powers”.
It is calling on the communications regulator to ensure that mandatory rural mobile and broadband coverage be written into regulatory rules for suppliers – which the business body believes would provide more transparency around the cost and coverage as well as the maximum speeds that customers are paying for.
The business body says Ofcom and political leaders also need to be more aware that many small firms who need to use mobile broadband services in border areas are having to deal with “unrealistic roaming charges” every day.
As Rennie says small business owners are fed up and cannot wait any more.
“My approach used to be to give any of the engineers who came out to help us a slice of cake and a cup of tea and they have all been very nice but we still don’t have superfast broadband yet,” she says.
Maybe cake, despite what the statistics might say, does not solve every problem.
