5G is a must with remote working here to stay

Jit­tery Zoom calls and that spin­ning wheel of doom might be what remote work­ing is com­ing down to as mul­ti­ple users in the same house­hold com­pete for increas­ing­ly stretched band­width on wifi net­works.

Indeed, a glob­al Future of Work study from IT firm Riverbed revealed that 94 per cent of deci­sion-mak­ers felt tech­nol­o­gy glitch­es had impact­ed their employ­ees while work­ing remote­ly. The most com­mon prob­lems were poor video call qual­i­ty, fre­quent dis­con­nects from cor­po­rate net­works, slow file down­loads and long response times when load­ing apps. The cause? Unre­li­able home wifi. 

Enter the 5G roll­out, the deploy­ment of the next-gen­er­a­tion mobile spec­trum that dozens of indus­try com­men­ta­tors are herald­ing as the cat­a­lyst for rev­o­lu­tion­is­ing remote work­ing. It’s set to pave the way for Zoom fatigue to be revived with aug­ment­ed and vir­tu­al real­i­ty ses­sions, for the spin­ning wheel of doom to become a dis­tant mem­o­ry, and for all mem­bers of the same house­hold to access their choice of apps and tools with no lag.

But with the UK government’s now infa­mous ban­ning of Chi­nese 5G net­work provider Huawei from sup­ply­ing the nec­es­sary tech­nol­o­gy, it’s unclear when this 5G-fuelled remote work­ing utopia will become real­i­ty. Accord­ing to a Huawei-com­mis­sioned report by research com­pa­ny Assem­bly, an esti­mat­ed three-year delay to the UK’s 5G roll­out could cost the UK econ­o­my £18.2 bil­lion in lost oppor­tu­ni­ties and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

Yet with remote work­ing very much here to stay, and Riverbed’s report con­firm­ing that busi­ness lead­ers world­wide antic­i­pate a 50 per cent jump in employ­ees work­ing from home post-COVID, how cru­cial will it be to over­come tech­no­log­i­cal inef­fi­cien­cies with sup­port­ing 5G tech­nolo­gies?

Is a 5G revolution part of the future of work?

For Bernie McPhillips, sales direc­tor at inter­net of things and 5G spe­cial­ist Pangea, the cor­po­rate demand for a 5G roll­out across a remote work­force has been clear among clients includ­ing Piz­za Hut, Addi­son Lee, Eti­had Air­ways and Birm­ing­ham City Coun­cil. From com­pa­nies plac­ing 16,000-strong orders for plug-in 5G routers and portable “mifi” don­gles, to those test­ing the tech­nol­o­gy first with senior exec­u­tives before con­sid­er­ing mass deploy­ment, the need is becom­ing more evi­dent.

“What was estab­lished ear­ly on dur­ing the lock­down was a lot of peo­ple’s home con­nec­tiv­i­ty wasn’t up to sup­port­ing full-time mass remote work­ing. Those types of demands have nev­er been placed on our con­nec­tiv­i­ty before,” says McPhillips.

“Hav­ing more house­holds home all day than ever before has just put an incred­i­ble amount of strain on our data net­works. We put up with delays as con­sumers, but we can’t tol­er­ate them as busi­ness peo­ple. As the speeds 5G can han­dle out­per­form ADSL [asym­met­ric dig­i­tal sub­scriber line] and in many cas­es fibre, you’re then going to be able to give peo­ple an office-type expe­ri­ence while in their own home.”

But busi­ness­es are still get­ting their heads around price and prac­ti­cal­i­ties, with the plug-in 5G router cost­ing £350 a unit and the 5G mifi don­gle com­ing in at around £100. There also remains a mis­con­cep­tion that 5G is the same as 4G but bet­ter, notes McPhillips, adding that while a lot of edu­ca­tion is still required, busi­ness­es are on the whole con­scious of the mount­ing pres­sure to future-proof.

Hav­ing more house­holds home all day than ever before has just put an incred­i­ble amount of strain on our data net­works

“Organ­i­sa­tions are now see­ing this as a long-term solu­tion and actu­al­ly form­ing a part of their core infra­struc­ture, rather than an inter­me­di­ary solu­tion giv­ing peo­ple a router in the short term to just work from home for a few months,” he says.

How the status quo is supporting working from home

But a delayed 5G roll­out shouldn’t be cause for alarm, Cisco’s chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer for UK and Ire­land Chin­tan Patel argues, as accord­ing to recent com­mu­ni­ca­tions reg­u­la­tor Ofcom’s data, 95 per cent of UK house­holds can access super­fast broad­band.

“In the UK, our net­works have coped well with the mass adop­tion of remote work­ing. We have a broad­band infra­struc­ture that’s sol­id and still advanc­ing. So while 5G will play a big role in advanc­ing many new and excit­ing tech inno­va­tions, in real­i­ty it isn’t need­ed to sup­port those in desk jobs,” he claims.

For busi­ness­es with pri­mar­i­ly desk-based work­forces, Patel believes their focus should be on three key tech­nolo­gies to help them work pro­duc­tive­ly, effec­tive­ly and secure­ly: video and col­lab­o­ra­tion tools, automa­tion, and cyber­se­cu­ri­ty.

“The cri­sis has also under­lined the impor­tance of automa­tion for reach­ing the spaces, places and areas that peo­ple can’t access dur­ing an out­break. Auto­mat­ed sys­tems have the poten­tial to keep fac­to­ries oper­a­tional. They also enable remote changes to be made to crit­i­cal IT infra­struc­ture, dat­a­cen­tres and net­works,” he explains.

“All of this needs to be under­pinned by robust cyber­se­cu­ri­ty sys­tems that encom­pass peo­ple, process­es and tech­nol­o­gy. With the increas­ing num­ber of mali­cious cyber-actors seek­ing to exploit the pan­dem­ic, cyber­se­cu­ri­ty is fun­da­men­tal to ensure teams of employ­ees oper­at­ing remote­ly can do so safe­ly and effec­tive­ly.”

The real relevance of 5G technology

But 5G will in fact play a key part in deliv­er­ing more robust secu­ri­ty for remote teams, coun­ters Fotis Karo­nis, chief tech­nol­o­gy and infor­ma­tion offi­cer of BT Enter­prise, par­ent com­pa­ny of mobile provider EE.

“5G com­bined with mobile edge com­put­ing will cre­ate new oppor­tu­ni­ties for oper­a­tors to deploy advanced cloud ser­vices and deliv­er more robust secu­ri­ty for mobile data and appli­ca­tions. With enter­pris­es cur­rent­ly pro­cess­ing data from mul­ti­ple loca­tions as employ­ees log on from home, this secure and effi­cient data and appli­ca­tion pro­cess­ing ensures busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity, even when faced with con­sid­er­able chal­lenges,” he says.

Cisco’s Patel, how­ev­er, is adamant inter­net ser­vice providers and their tech­nol­o­gy par­ents have moved quick­ly to build in extra capac­i­ty to meet the unprece­dent­ed rise in demand, high­light­ing that there is no direct depen­den­cy on 5G for remote work­ing itself.

He points to the real poten­tial as being “in ground-break­ing prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions and immer­sive expe­ri­ences”, such as stu­dents learn­ing through aug­ment­ed real­i­ty, doc­tors prac­tic­ing remote surgery and man­u­fac­tur­ing engi­neers trou­bleshoot­ing fail­ing equip­ment.

A connection speed breakthrough for rural areas

Notwith­stand­ing such argu­ments, per­haps one of the most sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits 5G cre­ates is enhanc­ing con­nec­tiv­i­ty with­in rur­al areas.

“Ofcom recent­ly announced the clear­ing of the 700 mega­hertz band, which is sig­nif­i­cant for rur­al mobile broad­band ser­vice because it is low fre­quen­cy. You can have the base sta­tions fur­ther apart and still have a good sig­nal, where­as the cur­rent 5G ser­vice in the UK is launched from a high­er fre­quen­cy band that does­n’t work so well in rur­al areas,” says Ian Fogg, vice pres­i­dent of analy­sis for mobile insights firm Opensignal.

Cisco’s own data reveals the UK’s rur­al econ­o­my could grow by an addi­tion­al £17 bil­lion over the next ten years if good-qual­i­ty 5G ser­vices are acces­si­ble.

With more wide­spread remote work­ing open­ing up oppor­tu­ni­ties for peo­ple to escape to the coun­try, as sug­gest­ed by data from prop­er­ty web­site Right­move, the con­nec­tion between 5G and remote work­ing remains inte­gral.

---