Piers Daniell

Never before has the internet played such a key role in bringing public events to the masses. First it was the election, then football, Wimbledon, cricket and even the budget brought to the desktop of thousands of office workers previously unable to partake in such events during office hours. With the advent of BBC’s excellent IPlayer the events are only a click away from anyone’s desktop.

As a business specialising in bringing connectivity to corporate customers, rather than consumers, we get to see the difference between a standard day in the office and one with a major event. Most of you will be familiar with 9/11 when the internet literally ground to a halt in the UK as we watched America come under attack. Back then there was very little video streaming and websites would crash under the demand for information.

Today it is a different story, and while England playing football by no means compares to the interest generated back in 2001, it does put the internet under enormous strain. And today we have video streaming which soaks up bandwidth putting demand on connections. For us, ie Fluidata, the game was an interesting test of the network which normally runs well below capacity as we focus on selling low contention, high bandwidth services.

As you can see from the graph from the monitoring on one of our networks we do literally nothing on the weekend (as most businesses are closed) and little traffic during the evening. However as the game started at 3 pm today (end of the graph) you can see traffic nearly doubled as people closed down outlook and logged onto the BBC…

As a business internet service provider we generally see quiet evenings, high traffic loads during the day and pretty much no traffic over the weekends. Last week however was slightly different as the country woke up to a hung parliament and proceeded to spend the rest of the day following developments. As you can see from the graph traffic on the 4^th, 5^th and 6^th May was relatively normal, however on Friday traffic loads increased dramatically as people demanded to know what was going on.

We saw a higher use of BBC’s IPlayer which became more prevalent as the day wore on as employers obviously relaxed the use of it within local networks. On a more national level we did see bandwidth restrictions in some operator’s networks as their backbone peaked. Roll on the World Cup!

Interesting article on BBC website regarding BT announcing that their network is ready for the extra demands the swine flu pandemic may put on the broadband network. Looks to me just like a press release but with the buzz word of the moment and the big news agencies are sitting up and taking notice. The fact that the announcement is completely pointless hasn’t put them off.

How BT can make a generic statement that people will be able to work from home is beyond me. However it is true that businesses who have adopted home worker technology will be able to cope with such an outbreak well in times of crisis. The fact that an employee could be at home working on their computer as if they were in the office, use the office phone and even video conference with other members of staff ensures the business can continue to trade. And with the advent of cloud computing this kind of scenario is easier for businesses to deploy, they just need to make sure the corporate network is up to scratch.

On a recent meeting I was surprised to hear that one company looking at Fluidata’s offering has plans in place to start sending people home this week on shifts to ensure there are enough staff to man the factories if swine flu took hold. He was also well prepared with systems being upgraded to cope better with remote working and VoIP deployed throughout the organisation. What he needed though was a fast, resilient corporate network with the capability to easily bring home workers into the network. One of the problems with this is making sure that the voice and data requirements are met so that the user experiences perfect quality.

Technologies such as ADSL2+ with Annex-M make this possible by giving users up to 2.6 Mb/s upload which is twice the capability of BT’s closest offering. The upload is just as important as the download when looking at voice and video requirements and therefore needs careful investigation when looking to deploy home workers. Certainly home lines have always focused on download rather than upload with poor contention guarantees making BT’s statement about the UK network being ready to deal with a national crisis slapdash especially if the businesses are using BT technology.