Our telecommunications networks are well-positioned to keep up with increasing demand as more people are working from home due to Covid-19, says an industry group.
And they are. But don't relax. Read to the end or you'll get caught out.
"The industry has made investments in the past to ensure that ample capacity exists, and this was demonstrated by the performance of the networks during the Rugby World Cup," said Telecommunications Forum (TCF) head Geoff Thorn this afternoon (the TCF's top-tier members are Chorus, Spark, Vodafone, 2degrees, Ultrafast Fibre and Vocus - the owner of Orcon, Slingshot and Flip).
"The New Zealand telecommunication industry has high-quality networks which are more than able to respond to extra demands on the networks from people working from home and spending more time at home due to self-isolation."
For better or worse, our domestic networks get far more of a workout from Netflix and gaming than they do from business-related cloud computing, so we know we have bandwidth for Africa.
Still, Thorn's Rugby World Cup reference won't reassure everyone. Plenty of people had wobbles with the stream, especially near the tournament, and Spark was of course forced to simulcast the second half of the All Blacks-South Africa pool game on TVNZ.
But intentionally or not, the RWC is a good analogy of how the internet works.
Spark did everything right from its end, but there are so many moving parts when content is being shuttled back and forth over an interconnection. Some of its partners dropped the ball. And some people were let down by poor broad in their area, or poor home networks.
Similarly, it could well be the case that there's good mobile and landline broadband in your area. Thorn's not exaggerating. Our internet is world-class.
But it might also not be for every staff member, which is why it's so important to do mass drills. Fix the roof while the sun's still shining.
And even if all employees have great broadband at home, it's still likely to stress your office network if a good proportion of them try to log in remotely at once.
Even Vodafone NZ, which makes networks and sells IT services, candidly admitted to a few teething issues with areas like videoconferencing and saving documents when some 1500 staff tried to remotely log on to its virtual private network (VPN) at once - not a surprise given VPNs are typically configured for normal times, when only a small percentage are working from home or the road.
Auckland Council found issues with wi-fi - and screensize during a smaller scale work-from-home drill.
And InternetNZ boss Jordan Carter has pointed out that employers' obligations go beyond technology to wellbeing and health and safety issues when staff are working from home.
And on the IT side, check what gear your staff have at home, just ancient and insecure their home wi-fi network is, and whether they have all the require passwords for VPN or cloud-based services - and that everyone's on the same page about which team-based chat and document sharing-tools you'll be using.
Bottom line: it's great that so much effort has been put into upgrading our telco networks, but up still need to give remote-working a real-life workout - and do it now while there's still time.
