"We would rather concentrate on effective bandwidth management than buy the big fat pipe," he said, adding that there is no shortage of players that can offer gigabit trunks.

"But our problem is getting the bandwidth to remote project sites where our people are, because they have the same bandwidth needs as the rest of the organization. At this stage we really don't have any significant applications that stream or run at 10Mbps; videoconferencing is kept quite lean but that is not a factor in getting a big fat pipe and only using one-tenth of it.

"It is all well and good to have our own trunk, but if the latency is high it is going to get you.

"A lot of our remote operations that use satellite networks find TCP does not deal with latency very well and there is the potential for wasted bandwidth as it sits there and waits for messages to come back."

To try and deal with latency and satelllite-based performance improvements, Creevey said the company is currently assessing a trial with Packateer for Web acceleration.