John Bartlett, retail systems infrastructure manager for The Adidem Group (which owns most of the Body Shop stores throughout Australia), has been running a VPN, which Global Data supplied, for about a year in around 100 stores.

Macquarie Telecom and Telstra also applied for the tender, but Bartlett chose Global Data.

"Not because it was the cheapest, but the company just proved to be extremely good in terms of service and response time," he said.

The broadband and VPN has meant that The Adidem Group has increased its Eftpos transaction times by up to five times, as well as having reduced the reliance on modems and multiple modem lines and associated costs.

"We used to have every single store, at that time over 70, on a dial-up modem, and most of them had to be making STD calls, so we've saved a lot of money there straight up," Bartlett said.