The beginning of the flu season in the UK is likely to affect broadband speeds, as more workers opt to work from home due to illness, claims industry analyst Gartner.

In a recently released report authored in collaboration with the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), it has been estimated that close to 40 per cent of the workforce may not be able to man their positions full time and hence opt in for working via the internet, which would increase the broadband traffic and reduce broadband speeds.

Currently, daytime commercial usage is low for home connections as most workers access the internet from the office. However, in the event of a flu pandemic, the number of people remaining at home will increase, and children particularly will stay at home and surf the internet.

To counter this, Gartner has suggested that employers distribute special software to help with the bandwidth and latency constraints that are likely to emerge. The pressure on broadband networks could be eased with the shifting of workload to 3G, WiMAX or satellite connections, ensuring better utilisation of all resources (see usb dongle info).

The research vice President at Gartner, Roberta Witty, commented on the issue saying that employers needed to plan better for work-at-home requirements through better coordination with network service providers and proper allocation of resources by figuring out which applications would need the most internet usage. Employers can also stagger the operations of several functions to better manage processes and ensure that the needed bandwidth is available.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 12:47 pm and is filed under End Users, School of Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.