BARRY COLLINS
The side effects of the homeworking revolution are starting to become apparent, and if employers want control they need to pick up the tab
The side effects of the homeworking revolution are starting to become apparent, and if employers want control they need to pick up the tab.
Nothing is straightforward in this most troubled of times. With Boris Johnson now shooing office workers back to their back bedrooms, a gnarly tech issue that was brushed under the carpet during the first lockdown is now proving too lumpy to hide.
When everyone first deserted their desks for the kitchen table, we just hooked our laptops to the home Wi-Fi and it sort of worked. The broadband network coped remarkably well with the overnight stress test.
Now it appears that homeworking is going to become a permanent thing for millions of us, there are bigger questions. First, who should be paying for that broadband connection if you’re spending the vast majority of time using it for work? Employers are effectively getting a free ride on your bandwidth, which doesn’t seem fair.
But broadband connections are now near-indivisible from a raft of other services. Four in five homes buy more than one service from the same provider, according to Ofcom, with broadband sold in bundles with phone contracts, landlines and TV. So how much of the tab should your company be picking up?
And then there’s the issue of support. The vast majority of home broadband connections are sold with less-than-businesslike support guarantees. Most domestic broadband connections are on Openreach’s Level 1 repair tier. This means that, when you report a fault to your broadband provider, Openreach has until the stroke of midnight on the working day after next to fix the line.
That could mean a fault reported on Friday morning isn’t dealt with until late Tuesday evening. Even then, more than one in ten faults take longer than two working days to fix, according to Openreach’s (pre-Covid) figures. Companies can’t afford to have staff offline for days at a time.
The need for better broadband has led some companies to demand that homeworkers take their broadband from the company’s preferred supplier. Yes, please do fetch the industrial-grade tin opener for this particular can of worms. I’m told that employees at one company trying to implement this are seething as a) they’ll lose all those bundle deals, and b) they aren’t keep on their employer having potential oversight of their domestic surfing habits.
A possible way around this is for firms to install a second, dedicated business line. It’s a costly process, but it might prove attractive to companies who are none too keen to have their business resilience dependent on TalkTalk, Sky and the like.
CCS Insight’s director of consumer and connectivity, Kester Mann, told me that he expected to see operators “offering dedicated work-from-home packages, either directly to consumers or into businesses, that could include guaranteed connectivity, unlimited data and certain Mi-Fi devices [for 4G/5G failover].”
Indeed, BT launched its Dedicated Connection package back in June, which provides a second line and 4G fallback. However, it only sends you the 4G router once you’ve reported a problem; it’s hardly five-nines uptime if you have to wait a day for your modem to arrive.
The unarguable advantage of a second “business” line is that there’s a clear cost that a company can account for, rather than forcing employees to move their domestic connection to the company’s preferred supplier. It’s also better for employees’ privacy, as they can keep their personal surfing separate.
Mann said there’s a growing feeling that companies will have to accept the burden. “In the longer term, certainly some of the larger organisations could start to subsidise or pay for broadband,” he explained. “For example, if they’re concerned about other things like security, privacy or even to understand what people are actually doing with their time when they’re at home… we might start to see enterprises getting involved with it.”
Mann’s colleague, chief of research Ben Wood, said that employers are already striking “big corporate deals with the BTs and Virgins of the world.
“We’re seeing their business sales force targeting companies to say it’s not just about providing the comms into your office any more, we can provide you a turnkey solution for your homeworkers too.” A source at a major telecommunications company told me there would be no issue with capacity if homeworkers suddenly needed second lines, either.
All of which lobs the ball back into employers’ courts. If they want you to work from home, they need to give you the proper resources to do it. A broadband reckoning is coming – employers have piggybacked on your connection for long enough.
Who should be paying for that broadband connection if you’re spending the vast majority of time using it for work?
The ball is in employers’ courts. If they want you to work from home, they need to give you the resources to do it