Just as print publishing has pioneered new working practices, the web and digital media industries have dramatically pioneered the use of digital production techniques, high-definition digital imagery and computer graphics.

Together, these trends have contributed to unprecedented demand for bandwidth and connectivity, which are our bread and butter.

Smarter publishing: Newsprint without the print

Publishing has changed beyond recognition. Today, many regional titles are now just newsrooms, with printing and distribution outsourced to specialist enterprises, serving dozens of titles. This relies heavily on resilient bandwidth and national connectivity. Now, journalists need hardly come into the office - they can operate almost entirely in the field, linked to the newsroom by powerful online tools. Substantial titles can be based in small, low-cost, out-of-town offices.

Site-to-Site Connectivity is opening up more agile publishing models, offering several ways of linking geographically distant sites. IPSec VPN and IPVPN provide the main secure collaboration networks, even over public infrastructure. And IP Multimedia, for advanced voice and video communication, is just one of several IP applications that achieve the most return on your core network investment.

High-capacity services: Moving rich media quickly

Moving huge quantities of data around the country is a speciality of ours. And it’s all thanks to our high-capacity services which can deliver up to 40Gb of bandwidth nationwide. Which means that safely handling everything from a major online title to a high definition video production to a sophisticated CG animation is a breeze.

Our end-to-end ownership of the network ensures reliable delivery of data, making our High Capacity Services and National Ethernet products ready for mission-critical applications. And if you’re after fully diverse resilience, you’ll find we use entirely different duct and equipment from BT’s.

24/7 productivity: The global relay

Internet connectivity at gigabit Ethernet speeds enables high-productivity working practices on a truly international scale. Suddenly, creating animated films has taken on a global perspective with a seamless relay of shift-working players across the planet. So, when the UK team shuts down for the day, partners in the US and South America pick up the day’s files and carry on where the UK left off. The Americans hand over to Australia, which then hands over to India, which returns its output to the UK when the HQ team starts work the next morning. And the baton is never dropped.

Fact is, over 5m customers rely on our Managed Internet Access service every day. Why? Because it offers always-on, symmetric and uncontended access for business-critical systems and applications at up to Gb speeds. Simply the right choice for delivering the resilience and reliability demanded by performance sensitive applications like voice, video and media-intensive CGI.

Collaboration hubs: Connecting the talent pool

Specialist media expertise is rarely found in one building. More often, the experts are miles apart. This is driving the rapid growth of media exchanges, where niche media businesses collaborate using high bandwidth networks. Now, highly specialist firms can collaborate on the delivery of complex projects across a metropolitan area, or even across the country. Such initiatives are changing media economics and outsourcing dynamics.

Our Ethernet Solutions enable key and niche media players alike to collaborate via high-speed connections. Our solutions are so versatile; their scalability and suitability for performance-sensitive applications can be configured to match all business needs precisely.

Contact centres: Outsourcing for growth

Call centres, as we know them, are a dying breed. As regional titles consolidate to support the sales activity needed to increase advertising revenue, they can find the call centre difficult to justify.

But today’s technology is changing all that. By outsourcing the advertising sales process to professional sales teams, using a combination of non-geographical numbers and advanced call-handling technology, smaller titles can finally get the marketing visibility they need.

Customer Contact Solutions including Presentation Numbers, can route all incoming sales calls to dedicated call centres where sales agents, supported by advanced call-routing and volume-management capabilities, can ’do the business’.