Return to Office: Sharp Rise in Bandwidth Usage
Spring is a time of renewal... and hope. This year, hope takes on greater meaning as we all pray that the global pandemic is truly winding down. At Atlantech Online, the coronavirus forced most of our staff to work from home. Of course, the same was true for many of our customers. Working from home became the norm rather than an exception to the rule. But, hope springs eternal and the return to the office will happen. And we're already starting to see it. What will that mean as we move forward in time?
People Did Go to Work
Even though the rule became work from home, people, and more importantly, computer and network systems, were still humming along at the office. Here at Atlantech Online, our field service technicians, data center operations and some technical support personnel would report on site every day, observing mandated protocols. Other customers did the same. While in the office, the employees would use bandwidth. Our observation is that bandwidth was used at higher rates than normal. One obvious reason why is since people weren't in the office, you couldn't just walk over and talk to them. You'd have to call, email or message. In more and more cases, of course, there would be a video call.
Video Hits Tipping Point
Though video has been prevalent for some time, because of Zoom and Microsoft Teams, video calling has become significantly more prevalent even for internal one on one communications. The result is a skyrocketing demand for bandwidth. In addition, documents are now shared on screen and the video/audio is of HD quality. Before the pandemic, collaborating in the office used no bits/bytes. Over Teams... working out details about a project may use Gigabytes of data, after all is said, shared and done.
Trickling Back to the Workplace
I've already noticed that traffic has increased. The only good thing about the 'rona is that driving into the office was a breeze. But, things are already starting to bottleneck on the roads. You don't want that bottleneck to extend to your network. We have one client that week of March 8, was peaking their data utilization at about 5 Gbps (see chart below).
One third of their users started returning back to the network week of March 15, and data utilization almost tripled! Over 13 Gbps!
We are seeing the same bandwidth demand increase happen with other clients. As employees are getting back into the office, the demand for bandwidth is not right where it was in February 2020. It's DOUBLE! At a minimum. The adoption of video calling, more use of cloud services and more general Internet usage results in higher demand of bandwidth.
Atlantech Online - The RIGHT Choice for Fiber
Atlantech Online is a trusted name when it comes to providing high-performance fiber optic Internet to power all of your communication platforms. With over 25 years in the industry, we understand the telecommunications trends before they become the new mode of operations and can spot patterns as they start to trend. You can count us to closely monitor bandwidth usage and ensure to alert you that you need to stay ahead of the demand curve.
Request a quote and make sure to also inquire about Hosted PBX service, too. Our cloud based telephone service is made for a workforce that is spread out... or all in one place!
