Businesses turn to telecommuting

By ADAM GIFFORD

The Sars virus and concern over travel post-September 11 are speeding the adoption of broadband as people turn to videoconferencing and telecommuting.

Telecom New Zealand advanced solutions head Chris Quinn says the company's videoconference traffic has doubled over the past three months. This is expected to save more than $600,000 a year in travel and staff-time costs.

Cisco's Singapore-based vice-president for service provider sales Andrew Murray, a New Zealander, said this had happened across the region.

"In Hong Kong, where Sars is pretty serious, people are being asked to stay home and work, and they're getting VPN (virtual private network) services to log them into their corporate networks.

"Having broadband is key," said Murray, who was in Auckland last week for Cisco New Zealand's 10th birthday celebrations.

He said Hong Kong and South Korea were leading Asia in the adoption of broadband, helped by aggressive pricing.

Singapore is not far behind.

"New Zealand is quite a way behind and I don't think it is for lack of technology ... "

New Zealand needed to get away from pricing models that treated bandwidth as a scarce resource, he said.

"As markets deregulate and become more competitive, that commoditises bandwidth.

"So simple connectivity and bandwidth aren't things you compete with, those are just table stakes for being in the game."

Murray said the swing to more internet protocol-based services within enterprises was a good opportunity for providers to use IP transport technologies to "layer" new value-added services.

"It is very hard across a digital line or frame relay line to layer on the value-add applications that you can on an IP service."

Video on demand is another application which Cisco says has taken off this year - mainly for online training and online communication staff.

"Banks and insurance companies are starting to do it because they have thousands of staff, and if there is new banking application or they want staff to try to sell insurance over front desk, they can do 10 or 15 minutes of training when they are able."

Murray said much of Cisco's research and development spending was in security, internet telephony, storage area networking and wireless local area networks.

"These areas will become more prevalent in business," he said.

"The big argument for going voice over IP for business is to be more productive, it reduces your cost of operations, and lets you run an efficient infrastructure going forward."

Murray founded Cisco New Zealand a decade ago, and moved to head office in San Jose three years later to run the company's Canada and Latin America divisions.