How well will our tech cope with working from home?
IS Covid-19 a once in a lifetime tech test? Will we all hammer broadband and mobile networks into a buffering mess? Can our creaky laptops and iPhone 6S handsets cope with sparky Microsoft Teams and its incessant pinging? Without the discipline of a dull desktop PC with its content restrictions, will we get lost down endless rabbit-holes of soap actors’ Wikipedia entries and YouTube clips from the A-Team?
More seriously, might ‘social distancing’ disproportionately hurt those who are already isolated and, if so, can tech do anything about it?
1 Don’t worry: the networks should cope fine
With so many people being asked to work from home, won’t there be pressure on broadband networks and the cloud? The short answer appears to be no. I asked two of the largest networks this last Friday, a full day into the government’s lockdown.
Both Eir, the largest overall network, and Vodafone, the biggest mobile network, said there was no apparent pressure on their systems.
“The main issues are things like Netflix and high-definition gaming,” one executive said. “The normal stuff around home working doesn’t take up anything like that kind of bandwidth.”
And what about kids being home for a fortnight or more? Won’t there be a surge in those users with families sitting around?
“We’re well used to it,” he said. “Look at the Christmas and summer holidays. Kids are off for months during the year.”
To make sure, I peeked at the traffic flow figures of the Internet Neutral Exchange Association (Inex.ie). While there was a mild rise last Tuesday, the overall flow wasn’t up much on previous weeks.
Three had a minor mobile network problem last Thursday, when calls and texts to and from the network were glitchy or dropped. But a spokeswoman said that was down to a power issue at one of its data centres and thus unrelated to anything to do with the current Covid-19 reshuffling of resources.
There is one possible network issue that a sudden edict around home-working may bring up. Plenty of people commute from areas and homes with terrible broadband to offices that have superb broadband.
If this is the case, and it looks like you’re stuck outside the office indefinitely, you may need to look into a mobile repeater to get a mobile broadband signal. These devices boost what can be a weak mobile signal being received indoors into a decent one. But they’re dependent on there being a reasonably decent signal outside the house.
Typically, repeaters involve a small antenna placed outside a building — on the roof or an outside wall — with a box inside the building to relay the enhanced signal. Unfortunately, these kits aren’t cheap and generally cost between €400 and €600.
A cheaper option would be to test different mobile networks around your home’s vicinity. It is possible your dreadful mobile signal may only be on your own phone network and that one or both of the alternative network mobile operators may have a usable data connection.
Just ask a friend to pop round and do a free Speedtest.net. If you get a decent result, you can either get a pay-as-you-go SIM card from that operator — both GoMo and Virgin offer up to 80GB per month for around €15 — or, if you need more data, get a special mobile router from the operator with a much higher data allowance.
2 Most of your existing tech works fine with remote tools
During the week, I put up an extensive checklist of tools and services that will get you through a work from home period like a champ. Subscribers can find the piece on Independent.ie. I emphasised affordable or free services such as Zoom, Slack and Teams.
The good news is that almost all of this works on your existing six-year-old home laptop or four-year-old smartphone.
In other words, you probably already have enough to get you through a week or two — or more, at a stretch.
If you think you’re going to be working from home for a while and think it’s smart to invest in new equipment, this is also now relatively affordable. A functioning laptop costs as little as €250, while a large-screen monitor — which may be a lot handier, ergonomically, for long periods at a screen — costs from about €90.
3 Think about tech to help your elderly relatives or neighbours
One of the biggest challenges is looking after elderly and others more susceptible to severe health consequences from contracting the virus.
Just as we now allow for when it comes to safety and security concerns, there is a place for some of the newer communications technology here. “I got a Facebook Portal for our house and for our parents,” tweeted Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison. “It’s a very good product. If you’re doing more remote check-ins than usual, [it’s] recommended.”
Facebook Portals are harder to come by in Ireland, but Amazon’s Echo Show or Google’s Nest Hub do the same basic job — easy to set up video calls and check-ins.
There may sometimes be other objections to these data-slurping giants, but in this type of crisis, some of the tech is critically useful.
It’s a similar story with social media, which might prove a useful stopgap. While the ‘social distancing’ directive may make medical sense, it is going to lead to an uptick in loneliness and associated mental health issues.
For someone who is elderly and lives alone it would be a good turn to try to call someone or, if you find them on social media, engage with them through a comment, message or even just a non-verbal ‘like’.