Magazine Pull

Home broadband users across the UK should be ready to face problems during the imminent flu season as it will be difficult for the local networks to cope with the swelled up bandwidth demand.

Under normal circumstances, internet usage for commercial purposes owing to work-at-home is at its peak during the daytime. During the same time, consumer traffic is lowest. However, during a pandemic, internet usage for both commercial as well as domestic purposes during the daytime will be heavy, as many children will stay at home during the daytime owing to the pandemic. This will cause heavy bandwidth demand.

Analysts Gartner and the Centre for Disease Control consider that 40% of the workforce will not be able to fulfil their positions for a considerable period of time. Thus although they will be able to continue with their work at home, it will be a challenging task for the local networks to cope up with the increased bandwidth demand.

The employers are distributing special software to deal with the problems involving bandwidth and latency. Gartner has suggested that increased use of satellite connections, WiMAX or 3G will also prove helpful in addressing the bandwidth issue (click for dongle broadband information).

Roberta Witty, research vice president at Gartner, said that organisations should include WAH impact planning in all negotiations with network service providers. They should work out strategies like deciding in advance about which work would require heavy bandwidth usage and breaking the hours of operations to deal with this problem.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.