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AN Inverness-based technology firm has had a very good year with better than expected growth.
Over the past 12 months HighNet Telecoms, which is based on the Cradlehall Business Park, acquired the Nutel business and has also increased the size of its workforce.
David Alldritt, HighNet’s technology and innovation director, said: “We are doing extremely well with double digit growth through the past year.
“We have seen a growth in headcount here in Inverness and down the road in our Glasgow office.
“One of the key things this year was our acquisition of Nutel, who are a local company we have brought into the fold.
“That has given us some new skillsets in house and additional field engineering resource that we didn’t have previously.
“That has helped make this a very productive year and we are looking for further acquisitions – particularly if there is an opportunity to buy another ISP network.”
He said he was pleased with HighNet’s current position and added: “We have a healthier top line, a healthier bottom line and a healthier balance sheet than we’ve ever had historically, so it’s been that continuous story of growth over 28 years.
“But I think it is fair to say we are accelerating that growth since the investment from Focus Group.”
The parent group is based in Shoreham and has a UK wide footprint – the group turnover is £150 million and it has 850 staff.
Mr Alldritt said: “Being part of that family has really helped us in terms of being able to deliver more for our customers.”
He said staff numbers had gone up, with more engineering roles mainly in Inverness and more account management and sales staff down in Glasgow. “After 28 years we were pretty strong already but we are now even stronger,” he said.
The business is looking to make more acquisitions of firms across Scotland, where the majority of its customers are based, and its network footprint very much covers the whole of the UK.
In Inverness, HighNet has been working in partnership with a number of strategic suppliers and David Munro, HighNet’s director of product, said: “We are using the City Fibre network, who have been busy over the past couple of years digging up the streets around Inverness and in other major cities across Scotland.
“They have been installing a whole new network, putting lots of fibre in the ground and we are now starting to see the benefits of that.”
HighNet offers a range of packages, to both residential and business customers, which is evolving and Mr Munro said: “We have got a consumer brand – BrawBand – but alongside that, with the HighNet side of the business we can now take advantage of this new fibre network going directly into business premises across Inverness and in other major cities in Scotland.
“We can now provide full fibre FTTP that is 900 Mbps up and down for a very affordable price. This is off the back of City Fibre putting in this new infrastructure over the past couple of years.
“The Inverness network build is now nearing completion, there are a few areas still to be built but we can pretty much reach every corner of Inverness now with this new product.”
For business users the 900Mbps package comes complete with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) and Mr Munro said: “This means that while it is using the same network infrastructure as the residential product, it comes with a quicker response for any faults and can be installed within a matter of days in many cases.”
BrawBand began in the Inverness area around 18 months ago and in that time it has grown to also cover the Glasgow, Renfrewshire and Edinburgh areas. Mr Munro said: “It has grown and the customer numbers are growing at a consistent rate. We are doing a good bit of business on BrawBand and the customers that we do have seem to like the branding. They like the way we communicate with them – we are getting a lot of positive feedback from existing customers and it seems to be resonating well across the country.
“In terms of our expectations of where we wanted to take the brand, it has far exceeded them.
“We now have a better understanding of the consumer marketplace and what marketing activity does/doesn’t work. We are pretty unique with our localised support we want to continue to take on the more established players and take a bigger slice of the market.”
Mr Alldritt added: “With BrawBand we set ourselves a target number of customers to reach within three years and we hit that number within two.
“The growth is accelerating particularly in the capital city where it was only recently launched, we are already picking up customers there and we can now reach nearly 27,000 homes in Inverness alone.”
However, the project has faced some hurdles along the way and Mr Munro said: “The success of BrawBand has not been without its challenges because we have grown at a quicker rate than we had expected.
“The recruitment of staff has not been easy in the current climate, so it has not been the plain sailing ride that we might have hoped for in every respect.
“As a local company we still feel we are providing a higher level of service than some of the more established brands, but recruitment has certainly been difficult across the Highlands in that particular area of the business.
“Things do seem to be getting better because of the strength of the brand and the fact that more people know about us now. We are getting more applications in when we are posting jobs now.”
BrawBand has recognised that customers are feeling the pinch due to the Cost of Living Crisis and tried to help out.
Mr Munro said: “We are aware there is a Cost of Living Crisis affecting consumers across the UK, so with that in mind we released a new product about six weeks ago.
“It is our lowest priced product in the consumer space, but it still offers something that is night and day compared to the incumbent copper based ‘fake fibre’ products.
“The Wee One offers speeds of up to 160Mbps up and down – so it is double the maximum speed you could possibly achieve on a legacy internet connection (though the reality is most consumers don’t get anywhere near 80Mbps on a legacy internet connection).
“The entry level one is particularly focussed on the current climate. We recognise that times are hard at the moment meaning there is a demand for it.”
The range includes: The Wee One with 160Mbps up and down; The Braw One with 500Mbps up and down: and The Big Yin with The Braw One 900Mbps up and down.
Mr Alldritt said being able to offer business grade broadband via fibre direct to the premises was also an advantage. He added: “All of that is delivered over HighNet’s own ISP network which reaches from Inverness, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and London.
“We operate that network to connect all of our customers across the UK and provide their internet services.
“All of that is very highly resilient, very high quality, high bandwidth capable.
“Through having that network in the ground we are able to add a consumer brand to it and add new products and services as and when they come along.
“Having installed our own equipment into the local telephone exchange in Inverness, that gives us that opportunity to bolt in City Fibre infrastructure as well as taking the existing BT Openreach infrastructure and connect those to our network.
“All over the country we are able to bring businesses, large or small, onto that high quality business grade network. Alongside this we can now add consumers to our network, accelerating our growth and making such a difference to the quality of broadband that people living in the Inverness footprint are now able to get.”
Mr Alldritt said being able to offer business grade broadband via fibre direct to the premises was also an advantage. He added: “All of that is delivered over HighNet’s own ISP network which reaches from Inverness, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and London.
“We operate that network to connect all of our customers across the UK and provide their internet services. All of that is very highly resilient, very high quality, high bandwidth capable.
“Through having that network in the ground we are able to add a consumer brand to it and we are able to add these new products and services as they come along.
“Local to Inverness that gives us that opportunity to bolt in City Fibre infrastructure as well as taking the existing BT Openreach infrastructure and connecting those to our network.
“All over the country we are able to bring people onto that high quality business grade network. Alongside this we can now add consumers to our network, that has made such a difference to our growth and made such a difference to the quality of broadband that people living in the Inverness footprint are able to get now.”
Mr Munro added: “We have installed our own equipment into the Inverness exchange and we have a team of network engineers that are housed locally here in Inverness that manage that core network for us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – I think that is a key differentiator, between us and some of our competitors, that we manage our own core network.
“We control what we do with the traffic that comes on to our network and we have direct relationships with the infrastructure providers that we are buying the services from. This means we can provide timely updates on orders or faults without having to go through a 3rd party, it also means we have more control over the commercials so can ensure we are very competitive.”
And over almost three decades the business has changed dramatically and Mr Alldritt said: “One of the key things about HighNet’s development over those 28 years is obviously the business market and the technology businesses use to communicate and to operate has changed hugely and so HighNet has had to change with it.
“In the early days it was just providing cheap phone calls when they weren’t local calls. So we would be fitting diallers to phone systems.
“Now it is a totally different world where we are operating an ISP network because everything is driven around internet connectivity. The old fashioned phone lines are going to be gone in 2025, that old PSTN network will be totally replaced by IP network where it is more internet based.”
“That changing technology has been accelerated by some of the challenges of the pandemic, with people getting used to more hybrid working and working from home using Teams and Zoom collaboration tools and we provide all of those things.
“In the old days it was saving you a few quid on your phone calls and line rental, then helping with new phone systems.
“Now we can do unified comms, collaboration, mobile connectivity, a whole suite of business communications and bring it into one place. In doing so we are always at that leading edge of technology to help our business customers adapt and change and improve their business efficiencies through the services that we can offer.
“That has always been a key thing for us to be at that leading edge of technology, not necessarily the bleeding edge where it is really painful for everybody, but just behind that.
“By being early adopters of technology, it means that our customers benefit from our early experience when we deploy new proven technology to them now.
“I think being at the sharper end of technology and technological change is what has helped us secure our position and our longevity has enabled us to continue growing throughout some of the challenges of the various economic cycles.”
Mr Munro said that being part of the Focus Group meant they could offer more services. He said: “As part of the investment from Focus Group we are now able to take advantage of some of the skillsets that they have in-house and some of the products that they offer, we can offer those products/skillsets to our channel partners and customers.
“One area we have not traditionally played in as a company has been the cyber security space. Now we can draw down on experience from industry experts in this field – whether it be security awareness training, traditional firewalls or dark web monitoring – we now have something we can offer to any business.”
Contact:
Cradlehall Business Park, Inverness IV2
5GH
T: 0808 168 0088
E: sales@highnet.com
www.highnet.com
