For one business involved in producing services that make the most of the existing low-bandwidth communications infrastructure, Anthropics' approach is something of a paradox. Despite developing applications that will extend the shelf life of narrowband, the London-based company has discovered that the best way to carry this out is by using broadband.
Anthropics is a four-year-old start-up that develops video-based messaging services for telecom networks. Last April it upgraded from ISDN to a 1Mbps leased line, both supplied by Netscalibur (formerly Direct Connection).
Anthropics' FaceWave application combines video and still photos with text or speech to create life-like "talking heads" for use in web and wireless applications, such as mobile messaging, web-based customer relationship management (CRM) and e-learning. Other possible functions include pre-recorded messages, live commentary and online performances, using voice and digital characters.
It can create, say, a personal newsreader, provide a personality in web chatrooms or enhance messages by sending a talking picture rather than plain text or voice. Users can scan in their picture and add text or voice, in a pre-recorded video message.
Based at the world-famous Ealing Studios with 30 staff, Anthropics' background is in film and television, and is currently working with network and mobile operators in Europe and Asia to launch some customer applications by this summer. According to the company, its technology is inexpensive to deploy, requires very low bandwidths and runs on the web and existing and future GSM, GPRS or 3G mobile networks.
However, it found that the development process works best when there are few restrictions on the dispatch of the bandwidth-hungry content with which it works - video - around the Anthropics network as well as to and from partners around the world.
"Prior to Anthropics getting broadband, things were really, really slow. Because our company comes from a film and television background a lot of the attachments we receive are megabytes in size, so our ISDN connection really struggled," says Gary Sleet, Anthropics' senior development manager.
Impressed with the service it had from Netscalibur for ISDN, Anthropics retained the ISP for the leased line. The transition made plain sailing on the whole, except for a delay by BT in deploying the local loop.
The telecoms giant, already accused of a snail-pace response to the demands of prospective broadband users, insists on a 50-day instalment period. In Anthropics case, this became 55 days, even though the local exchange was literally across the road from Anthropics.
However, once it had made the switch, one of the first things that struck Anthropics was the massive drop in fixed costs - despite the increased capacity - to a fraction of what they were with ISDN.
"With ISDN it used to cost us £595 a month which, when transmitting around 10Mb a day, worked out at £1.98 per Mb," says Craig Parnham, Anthropics' head of marketing and planning. "In the meantime, the amount of traffic processed has increased dramatically, with more people at the company and more work generated.
"We now process between 400Mb and 1Gb of information externally every day - an average of between 17Gb and 18Gb per month. With a leased line we pay a flat monthly fee of £505 plus VAT. So the average price we pay now is 3.5p per Mb, and we are able to do more things." Anthropics also paid a one-off installation fee of £300.
Other advantages of broadband include the newfound capacity for remote working. "Some of our staff have ADSL [asymmetric digital subscriber line] broadband connections at home which allow access to the servers at work," explains Parnham. "Take our production manager for example. On a typical weekend, he'll stream 300Mb of video files. But now he can cut out the two-hour round commute to the office over that weekend and remotely run batch files from home.
"The leased line also allows us to host over 20 websites on the premises. Two examples are our FaceWave T2V [text-to-video] and S2V [speech-to-video] servers, which convert still images into animated messages via a text or speech input.
"Having the servers on site allows us to do our development work a lot faster than remotely located servers. It also makes us more responsive to customers as many more can simultaneously access our demos and marketing campaigns."
Anthropics did also consider ADSL broadband - the main version of broadband being pushed in the UK by the likes of BT - but plumped for the leased line instead, citing three shortcomings with ADSL.
First was the issue of "contention", which refers to the degradation of capacity and speed of an ADSL connection as the number of users sharing the network increases - the users being in contention with each other for the available bandwidth.
"Also, we needed a permanent connection to guarantee 1Mbpsc capacity. With ADSL you can uplink to the web at that rate, but the highest you'll get when downloading is 500 kbps," Parnham says.
He adds that with ADSL it is impossible to conduct more than one video conference at a time, a feature increasingly desirable as the company pursues more business abroad. "With the leased line, if we need to talk to the US and Asia at the same time, we are guaranteed the bandwidth we need at that time."
Anthropics plans to move from Ealing Studios to a central London location in May and will use the opportunity to upgrade to a 2Mbps leased line. "In the medium term, for our internal development work, this upgrade will see us through for another year," says Parnham.
For Anthropics, the advantages of moving to broadband were especially obvious, given the nature of its work and the content it works with. With falling entry prices and wider availability, maybe more generalist concerns will begin to weigh up the potential benefits.
