Bexhill pair pioneer broadband business offer

Custom Image Printing and Embroidery and Gotham New Media Ltd, along with Solica Consulting Ltd of Bodiam and Impression IT of St Leonards, will soon reap the benefits of faster access to a global market.

The South East England Development Agency's 300,000 Satellite Broadband Pilot, launched in May, is aimed at communities in the South East, particularly areas targeted for regeneration, where current transport infrastructure and lack of Broadband access undermines future prosperity.

Hastings and Rother was one of the targeted areas with more than 100 small to medium sized businesses or organisations eligible for grants.

Companies receive up to 1,066 each for one year for Broadband access via satellite.

The benefits of Broadband are its low cost, the fact that it is permanently on, its speed and ability to transfer large amounts of data eg moving images. It is ideal for security systems and video conferencing with easy PC-to-PC communication

Mark Meakings, director of Gotham New Media Ltd, in Sandhurst Lane, Bexhill, said he was looking forward to the benefits of Broadband.

He said it would be used for on line e-learning, global net conferencing with resellers, and global on-line sales and support.

"Our company have invented the word's fastest way to touch type. Our product is called KAZ (short for keyboarding A-Z). We are developing a new e-learning site for KAZ at the moment. We are online for most of the day and often have to download and upload large files to our customers, resellers and outsourcing business."

He said Broadband would speed up this process and give him a lot more time for other business.

The Kaz course enables people to learn touch-typing in 90 minutes as opposed to 10-15 hours in the old way.

"We believe a million people all over the world have learned by the Kaz system, individually or through schools, colleges, the Open University, and Learndirect.

"It has been PC World's second best seller for three years and is sold in American, with local versions for Holland and Spain."

Chris Meredith, proprietor of printing & embroidery company Custom Image/t-shirts4u.co.uk, of Cowdray Park Road, Little Common, will use Broadband to receive customer enquiries from web sites and reply to them immediately as well as exchanging design ideas with customers and e-mail marketing.

"Ours is an Internet-based garment printing and embroidery business and having a permanent connection will enable us to react to customer enquiries within minutes, which can be critical when dealing with both large and small companies," he said.