System News
With the coronavirus now affecting much of our lives, Mark Williams looks at its effects on the PC and tech industry.
As the coronavirus spreads through the community, governments have acted, which has led to the rise of people staying at home for extended periods of time, be it for self-isolation or to work from home. Where much of the economy is feeling the pain of falling or no patronage thanks to social distancing rules and forced closures of many venues, the tech sector is experiencing something of a boom. Staying or working at home means people need IT hardware like computers, monitors, keyboards to either keep themselves entertained or productive in their job remotely.
As our two industry contacts reveal in Shop Talk, computer stores are finding it hard to keep up with demand, not only because of the increased demand itself, but because China went into lockdown months ago due to COVID-19, stopping PC parts production that much of the world relies on. While many of these suppliers are now ramping production back up as China eases its restrictions, there will be a continued strain on supplies while we ride out the production lag time.
Jaimie from Leader Computers said: “Supply has definitely been affected, but things are starting to come back online now as vendors retool factories from outside the immediately affected zones in Wuhan and the surrounds.”
“I think it will be a tough ride through till at least the end of the financial year to be honest and could easily stretch through to September. The problem is the Australian market is very small compared to US and Europe etc, so it is very hard to get stock allocations here.”
All this computer equipment is for nothing without the network to connect them all, the internet. NBN Co has been collaborating with governments and RSPs to ensure capacity as the usage demand increases. Leading NBN to offer RSPs a waiver on overage fees for up to 40% higher traffic flow for the next few months so that prices and bandwidth remain accessible during this period.
The likes of Youtube, Amazon Prime and Netflix in Europe are reducing video streaming quality so as to not choke local internet infrastructure and Google has said it would stop or minimise updates to its Chrome browser for a while to provide as stable a browsing platform for those now heavily reliant on it.
Remote desktop access companies are having a field day with companies implementing work from home strategies. TeamViewer, for example, is seeing such a high demand for its products it is commissioning more servers to cope with the demand and has even cut prices on its top tier enterprise plans by half so that smaller entities not normally the target for such products can find it accessible and benefit from what it has to offer.
Valve’s popular gaming service Steam has also broken records for the most players online at any one time (currently over 22 million) and players concurrently in games (over 7 million players), showing just how much gaming has spiked as people search for things to do in isolation. Xbox and PlayStation networks have also touted large increases in player volumes too.
While we all wait for a vaccine, you can help contribute to the scientific fight against COVID-19. The long running Folding@Home project has added COVID-19 as a project you can donate spare compute time towards to help scientists understand the virus better. People are flocking to the project to help and has seen a normally steady active user count of 10,000 explode to well over 150,000 in the space of just two weeks.
If your PC is sitting idle at home and you’d like to help the scientific effort, head on over here to get started https:// foldingathome.org/covid19/