COVID-19 – Home Working Probably Won’t Break UK Broadband

Over the past few days a number of newspapers and websites have run with stories claiming “experts” are predicting that the United Kingdom’s broadband ISP networks “will be unable to cope” if millions of people start working from home during the COVID-19 Coronavirus outbreak, but such reports can be misleading.

Remote working is of course nothing new to modern business culture, although the degree to which it’s supported often depends upon the job you’re doing (you can’t do much work from home if your job is being a waiter in a restaurant or on a factory assembly line etc.), as well as how capable the IT and network setup is at your place of work. Suffice to say that many jobs, especially practical ones, simply don’t translate well or aren’t possible to do from home.

Meanwhile larger or more IT centric businesses will often have their own internal Virtual Private Network (VPN) platforms, which enables employees to login and access their work when at home or while travelling aboard. Smaller businesses may similarly allow some work to be taken home, although data protection laws (GDPR) could restrict what work they’re able to do without a proper system in place like larger firms.

Crucially the vast majority of work that ordinary people tend to do is actually fairly lightweight in terms of its data impact upon a broadband network. For example, sending/receiving emails, database updates, replying to online messages, writing reports, filling in forms and answering calls (assuming VoIP, so as to avoid using personal lines) are all common office tasks that would be possible on even some of the slowest home broadband links.

For example, a couple of years ago I had to keep ISPreview.co.uk updated, upload images and check emails while flying over the ocean with access to only a congested Satellite link, which struggled to maintain a 1Mbps download (c.0.2-0.5Mbps upload) at best with extremely high latency (well over 1000ms) and the odd disconnection. Horrible, but it just about worked and that’s an example of very poor connectivity.

What about more demanding tasks?

Several recent reports have highlighted examples of video conferencing calls and en masse internet trading as areas that could strain existing broadband links, which may be true for a smaller proportion of overall jobs but there are other considerations here too. Video conferencing calls do benefit from better upload speeds in particular, but most codecs can scale down their quality to work on slower lines (not ideal but workable).

As for trading, we can only assume the example is a reference to High Frequency Trading (HFT), since ordinary trading would be fine on many slower lines. By comparison HFT tends to require very specialist private leased lines or bespoke Microwave links to get the absolute best possible latency (i.e. you’d usually need a lot more than even a domestic full fibre FTTP line to properly conduct this sort of work). In any case such trades aren’t going to impact wider network capacity, not least since they’re mostly time rather than data capacity dependent.

However, there are certainly plenty of jobs that could, in some parts of the country, prove to be more problematic. Any job that requires a significant amount of data transfer (e.g. graphic design, 4K/8K video processing, mass data processing / backups) may be harder or even impossible to achieve in areas where only slow ADSL lines exist. Likewise even some better connected FTTC (VDSL2) areas may struggle with some of these (e.g. lines can be as slow as 2Mbps in some areas).

Overall though many of these data intensive tasks tend to be in the minority and are thus unlikely to stress ISPs much more than, say, a busy day caused by major online software / video game update(s) or the mass streaming of big sporting events.

Arguably a bigger challenge could occur when the demands of greater remote working clash with those of a typical family environment (heavy video streaming and downloads etc.), particularly if COVID-19 results in the closure of schools. In the above scenario we could see the combined impact causing a slowdown in service speeds at some providers on some connections, but they should still cope (i.e. they won’t crash but general traffic management may kick in to balance load).

Some just need to upgrade

One easily overlooked factor here is that a lot of people live in parts of the UK where significantly faster broadband connections or packages are already available, although for one reason or another the individual may have chosen not to upgrade (e.g. lack of awareness about the faster services, being stuck in a long contract term with their current ISP and the higher price of faster tiers may discourage adoption etc.).

Likewise in a fair few locations, where fixed line broadband is poor, then it is sometimes possible to adopt a 4G (mobile broadband) service instead. This has become more attractive now that all of the major operators – Three UK, EE (BT), Vodafone and O2 – have introduced “unlimited data” plans. The catch is that mobile performance remains highly variable, both from place to place and operator to operator.

Equally if an individual only needs to upgrade because of the demands being placed upon them by work then, assuming a better service is available, this may raise a more complicated question about who should pay (a tricky conversation to have with your boss).

Likewise some upgrades may incur a bit of downtime or involve a lead time of several days or weeks before the service goes live, which are issues that could create additional problems for a mass move to remote working. Speed and capacity are not the only issues.

What do ISPs say?

No analysis, even a simplified one like this, would be complete without actually asking some broadband ISPs for their thoughts and we’ve today canvassed nine of them (including all of the largest players and some of the smaller ones). Broadly speaking, none of the providers to have responded so far appears to be particularly worried and all say they can increase capacity to cope with rising demand.

Simon Davies, Director of iDNET, said:

“We are very well placed and prepared for an increase in customers working from home. Our services are truly unlimited which means that customers are able to stream as much Catch-up TV, video and movies as they like, and many do just that most evenings.

So our network has scaled to support the huge increase in video streaming that has been a significant trend over the past few years. Consequently we see correspondingly less traffic during the working day which leaves plenty of underused capacity on our network for home workers.”

A Vodafone Spokesperson said:

“We have been adding capacity and minimising congestion at busy aggregation nodes to meet the growing demand for our home broadband service. We have achieved good results already after the live streaming of football over the Christmas period generated record levels of internet traffic.

In addition, we are working hard with our critical national infrastructure customers to test their business continuity planning and expand capacity where required. We have a dedicated team set up to do this. This is in addition to providing virtual private network services, videoconferencing, VoIP and cloud and hosting services to businesses so they can conduct virtual meetings and share information quickly and securely from remote locations.

We have conducted tests on our own internal network and continue to do so to ensure we have ample capacity to allow any number of employees to work from home if necessary.

The same applies to mobile. If large numbers of customers stay at home then we move capacity around to ensure they continue to receive a strong signal. We get to put this to the test every time it snows in the UK.”

Martin Pitt, MD of Aquiss, said:

“On balance we don’t expect to see any issues, with traffic to be in line with a public bank holiday or where snow has resulted in a large percentage of customers to be home based. We already have the network modelling in place to cater for those.

However, we are potentially in uncharted waters. As a precaution we have already taken steps to increase and activate backhaul extra capacity and have the assurances in place from our upstream suppliers of equal measures. We are more than confident that no issues will arise or customers experiences will be impacted. Furthermore we have completed and tested all our systems to allow our own staff to be homeworking based, in the event of any Government advise to do so.

Where we are seeking clarity from our suppliers and establishing protocols, is around Engineer visits for both new provisions and faults and how those maybe impacted.”

Paul Stobart, CEO of Zen Internet, said:

“We are following the circumstances around COVID-19 closely, and continue to monitor the Government’s guidance and advice.

As a responsible broadband provider our network is carefully managed so that Zen’s customers consistently receive the internet speeds that they’ve come to expect. This helps for us to plan and cater for any spikes in traffic caused by increased demand.

We have seen no increase in daytime traffic on our network, so the working from home effect has not yet happened, but if it does, we are ready for it. We have full confidence in the resilience of our network capacity, and will be in a strong position to facilitate the needs of our customers in the instance that more need to begin working from home.”

A BT Spokesperson said:

“BT’s networks are built to support ‘evening peak’ network capacity, which generally equates to at least ten times daytime (working hours) demand, driven by streaming video, sports content for example. As a result, we’re confident that the UK’s broadband network could handle mass-scale home-working in response to Covid-19.”

Andrew Glover, Chair of the Internet Services Providers’ Association (ISPA), said:

“The possibility of the UK having to remotely work over the next few months has led to questions about the ability of ISPs to handle the additional workload of employees working from their homes.

ISPs are ready to handle any potential extra bandwidth and consistently assess the demands that are being put on their networks. Businesses and companies will need to ensure that their own systems, e.g. their server setup, support a potentially significant increase in remote connections to accommodate the potential increase in traffic from their employees.”

The generally agreed conclusion above is that consumers shouldn’t expect their broadband service to go kaput. Providers have a lot of tools at their disposal to raise or manage network capacity when required. On the other hand there’s still an element of uncharted territory about the whole COVID-19 situation and thus nobody should take it for granted, but ISPs seem to be well prepared.

The fact that some reports have also confused issues with speed in the local access network with that of the ISPs core or wider network capacity – two different sides of the same coin – certainly doesn’t help matters. The race to upgrade the nation to full fibre and gigabit-capable services is of course vitally important and we’ll all benefit from that but, as above, many core business tasks can still be done on significantly older and slower lines.

Arguably the biggest real-world problem is likely to stem from the fact that many businesses simply aren’t properly set-up with the right software, network (VPN etc.) or processes to support the full range of remote working across all of their divisions.

We are currently awaiting responses from several other ISPs and will update this article as those arrive.

UPDATE 2:45pm

Added a comment from BT above.

UPDATE 3:48pm

Added a comment from the ISPA above.