Fiber

Fairly Fast Fiber

Fiber is accelerating the pace of business.

Video is big. With the newest commercial production cameras shooting at 6K resolution, the size for video files is climbing and surpassing a whopping 1 terabyte per hour of footage. To put that into perspective, that’s about 285,000 mp3 files. It takes a lot of time to move that kind of data.

Ryan Lockwood is a Senior Art Director at Fairly Painless Advertising, a nationally-recognized advertising agency in Holland. He works with some of these gigantic files every day, and transferring them to clients and vendors for editing and graphics was a common pain point for him, often requiring him to copy files to a physical drive. Thankfully, Fairly Painless has been able to take part in a pilot program for their downtown Holland location which extended gigabit fiber optics to their building.

Before fiber, they were using a local cable internet service provider, maintaining a typical business speed of around 10Mbps(upload)/100Mbps(download). Fiber gained them access to speeds of up to 500Mbps on their existing network equipment. With newer internal equipment, they would get access to speeds surpassing 800Mbps.

“Even without upgrading our equipment, our speeds increased significantly”, Ryan said. “The creative team can upload files in seconds instead of minutes, saving us valuable time on tight deadlines.”

Fairly Painless also uses their internet for phone service. “There was a distinct improvement in our phone system after we switched to fiber,” Ryan said, “Voices were coming in clear, with no dropped calls.” Ryan’s clients are all over the nation. Phone and internet services are vital to communicating and providing superior service.

Fairly Painless also recently added a Grand Rapids office. Fiber has helped ease the growing pains of having multiple facilities. “Our teams work together through an online server,” Ryan said, “The two offices can connect quickly and efficiently with files that download in little time.”