Series on Next Gen NBN adoption

Mr Foh Chit Yee: With the Next Gen NBN, the connection from home is almost as fast as what we have in the office.

Doing more on the digital highway has translated to less time on the road. And integrated marketing and communications company Spinn is more than happy with this new arrangement.

Established in 1997, Spinn has its roots in video production but has broadened its scope of services in recent years to include branding and communications as well as marketing activities such as advertising, road shows and other events. The company currently has 34 staff, about 15 of whom are based in Singapore and the rest in China and the United Arab Emirates.

The nature of Spinn’s business is such that it deals with very large video files which could range from several megabytes to 10GB, and communicates frequently with clients for work-in-progress reviews and feedback.

To meet its communication needs, Spinn had been using an ADSL service which offered download speeds of up to 15 Mbps. The problem, however, was with uploads. “This was the bottleneck. Downloads were fast, but uploads could be as slow as 512 kbps or even lower,” said Mr Foh Chit Yee, Founder, President and Executive Producer of Spinn.
“Uploading a 10 GB file could take an entire night,” said Foh. “We would start the upload before we left the office and hopefully when we returned the next day it would be completed.”

The speed was so slow that it was sometimes more efficient for Mr Foh to bring a video tape personally to his client instead of sending it via the Internet. He recalled making a day trip to Hong Kong a few years ago just to show the customer a video.

The upload limitations also curtailed the company’s use of communication tools such as Skype and video conferencing. “If we have one session of uploading and one session of Skype, the office connectivity slows down to a crawl.”

Two years ago, in looking to upgrade to a better price/performance package, Spinn began subscribing to a Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network (Next Gen NBN) service from SingTel, which offered symmetrical upload and download speeds of 100 Mbps at S$350 a month.

The impact of the Next Gen NBN was felt almost immediately, with Spinn now able to upload megabytes, and at times gigabytes, of videos daily to its clients for discussion and feedback. “Usually, we would have 20 to 30 meetings before a product is finalised. Rather than meeting face to face, we can now upload the video and talk to each other on Skype, or communicate via email and instant messaging. We still have meetings, but it has been cut down by quite a lot.”

For clients who are based overseas, the number of meetings could even be reduced to just two – one midway through the project and the other when it is completed.  This, in turn, has enabled the company to operate more efficiently. As Mr Foh pointed out, “Less time on the road is already increased productivity.”

The Next Gen NBN connection has also eliminated the need to “queue” to make Skype calls or to upload large files in the office. “We can now have multiple sessions,” said Mr Foh, noting that up to four concurrent video Skype sessions have taken place without even stretching the network.

With the Next Gen NBN, Mr Foh is also able to work from his home, where he has a separate fibre subscription. “The connection from home is almost as fast as what we have in the office,” he said. “When I copy the video files back , I can get about 5-6 Mbps, so in 3 minutes I can have a 1 GB file transferred over.”

In comparison, this would have taken 200 times longer with the 512 kbps upload speed for the office server using ADSL, which would translate to about 10 hours of waiting time.

In fact, the speed of the Next Gen NBN connection also allows Mr Foh to do the video edits on the office server itself, while he is at home.

Employees, too, can make use of the Windows Remote Desktop and connect back to the office using a Virtual Private Network, “The data resides in the office, but they can work on their home PC as if it were the office computer.”

There is also greater flexibility for staff to monitor various tasks remotely. “They can work from home to check if the rendering is okay. Last time, they had to come back to the office later in the evening or over the weekend to do that.”

And day trips to Hong Kong to show his client a video are a thing of the past. “We don’t have to do that anymore because the upload speed makes sense now.”