GUEST COLUMN:
Gruff Vaughan
Founder and Co-CEO
Storm + Shelter
What are the things that would stop your office from functioning in an instant?
Fire, flooding, various other Acts Of God, sure. But if you told your staff that there would be no running water for the rest of the week, for example, would they bat an eyelid? Mine wouldn’t. Maybe a few grumbles here and there. All natural sunlight cancelled until further notice? Most of them are editing footage in a dark room anyway. Not a problem, boss!
But losing the internet? That hits different.
For a video production business, someone crying out “THE INTERNET DOESN’T WORK” is the modern equivalent of the school bus not turning up on a snow day. A brief period of confusion and helplessness, followed by the hushed whispers of “shall we just go down the pub?” growing louder and more confident with every passing second…
Without a rock solid internet connection, there’s very little point in people being at their desks.
STORM+SHELTER is a video production agency based in Cardiff. We’ve been at it since 2013, when three clueless young’uns left university and decided to give running their own business a go. Slightly improbably, it worked! Today, we’re a team of around ten, alongside a wider network of freelancers around the UK, producing film and animation for brands, agencies and public sector organisations — from national campaigns here in Wales to internal communications for Amazon teams in different parts of the world.
People often imagine production as mostly cameras and shoots, but honestly, most of the job is being sat at a computer, flinging gigantic data files hither and yon, while software tries to auto-update itself at the worst possible opportunity, and three people are trying to video call you, all at once. At any given point in our office, somebody is uploading footage to the cloud, someone else is syncing project files with a freelancer somewhere else in the country, and an editor is quietly furious because our online edit review software has decided to behave strangely for reasons known only to itself.
Connectivity isn’t sitting alongside the workflow anymore. It is the workflow.
Which is why our move into Cardiff city centre unexpectedly became a connectivity infrastructure challenge.
We’d previously been based down in Cardiff Bay before moving into our new office near City Hall and the museum. Naively, I assumed that moving into the middle of one of the UK’s biggest cities would mean connectivity stopped being something I had to think about. But the reality is that parts of Cardiff are still reliant on older “legacy” infrastructure, often at prices that don’t really reflect what modern creative businesses actually need.
And for production companies, upload speed matters just as much as download speed, which is a fundamental fact that a lot of providers still seem weirdly reluctant to acknowledge. We’re not just emailing spreadsheets around; we’re handling huge volumes of video footage, animation assets and chonky project files. A connection can look impressive on paper because the download speeds are decent, but if uploads crawl along in the background then the whole system starts falling apart pretty quickly.
Someone at home uploading a video of their turkey dinosaurs to social media might be dealing with a file that’s half a gigabyte, but we regularly come back from shoots carrying four or five terabytes of footage (that’s five thousand gigabytes!). That material needs to move between our office, cloud platforms, freelancers, external collaborators and clients — often across multiple countries. Without the right infrastructure, you either spend half your life waiting for uploads to finish (I genuinely once saw the words “Time remaining: 217 days” on my screen before considering reassessing my choice of career) or you end up posting fragile hard drives around the world like it’s 2009. Neither is ideal.
That’s where the Hypercity network made a genuine difference for us.
The network itself is a substantial piece of infrastructure investment: 174 kilometres of fibre installed across Cardiff in partnership with Cardiff Council, specifically aimed at improving connectivity in areas that have historically been underserved. Elevate built the network, giving businesses access to modern fibre infrastructure capable of speeds up to 10Gbps (for the technically averse, this number roughly translates to “hilariously fast”).
In practical terms, what mattered to us was much simpler: we could get a proper symmetrical gigabit connection (that upload speed = download speed challenge from earlier) and for less than half the price that other providers in Cardiff quoted me to use their legacy “$$$ business leased lines $$$”.
Another crucial part of the equation is futureproofing.
Right now, a symmetrical one gig connection comfortably does what we need it to do. But production workflows only ever move in one direction: larger files, more cloud collaboration, faster turnaround expectations and increasingly complex delivery requirements. Knowing the underlying infrastructure provided by Elevate is already capable of scaling far beyond what we currently need (literally 10x the current performance!) gives us confidence we won’t suddenly hit a ceiling a few years down the line.
There’s also a resilience aspect to it.
When your business relies this heavily on connectivity, support matters enormously. If a line gets damaged somewhere outside your building, there’s realistically very little you can do yourself. Having direct access to people at Elevate who can escalate issues quickly is massively valuable compared to disappearing into the usual telecoms support labyrinth. (You’re now humming one of those hideous “your call is important to us” jingles to yourself, aren’t you?)
And finally (I promise), cybersecurity increasingly sits within the same conversation too.
With the help of AI, we’re now building our own software internally to support complex production workflows and client work, which naturally pushes us closer towards things like Cyber Essentials Plus and broader security certification requirements. I’m reasonably comfortable around a lot of the technology we use internally, but there are still points where specialist advice becomes important — and for smaller businesses especially, having access to that support from Elevate can make a huge difference.
More broadly though, I think infrastructure like this matters to Cardiff more than people sometimes realise.
Creative businesses don’t just need good offices and nice coffee shops. They need the underlying systems that allow them to operate competitively on an international level without feeling like they eventually have to leave the city in order to grow.
For Cardiff’s creative industries, networks like Elevate’s Hypercity genuinely change what’s possible.
Gruff Vaughan talks about this and more on the Elevate podcast Powering Cardiff’s Digital Future here:
