Turkey farmer Bernard Matthews has signed a contract with internet provider CI-Net to deliver DSL broadband connections to each of its 40 farms in Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire.

Staff at each farm need to stay connected to Bernard Matthews' head office in Norwich to access its inventory management software. This enables accurate planning and management of supplies, including stock control and weekly deliveries of thousands of tonnes of turkey feed.

Edwin Pearson, information systems director for Bernard Matthews Farms, was keen to find a single internet service provider (ISP) that could minimise connection outages and successfully connect all its sites under a single contract. Six of the farms were so remote that they were unable to get any form of fixed broadband at all.

"Our previous provider for these farms was BT, which said it could not provide broadband. Some of them were using mobile broadband using a dongle plugged into the PC, others were on dial-up and one was using satellite," said Pearson.

Three of those six are now successfully connected with an ADSL Max service offering up to 8Mbit/s of bandwidth, but averaging about 4Mbit/s said CI-Net. The company succeeded where others had not by installing new copper cables at some sites, and configuring its own network to eliminate contention and prioritise Bernard Matthews' business data traffic.

"It is slightly more expensive because it is a managed service rather than just individual broadband lines, but it means we can find out if broadband is down at most of our farms whereas previously we had to wait for them to tell us it was not working," said Pearson. "In recessionary times we have slimmed down our manpower significantly, and CI-Net has taken over some of the things our own staff used to do."

Bernard Matthews pays £40 per month for the ADSL Max connections now serving 37 of its 40 farms, with the other three connected using a combination of 3G and satellite.

The rollout is currently in phase two of a five-phase implementation. CI-Net currently provides StoneGate firewall appliances at six sites, including Bernard Matthews' head office, to boost security and load balance-wide area network (WAN) traffic to improve performance. These will also provide automatic failover into the inventory management system should any one DSL connection fail.