WAH to jeopardise Internet bandwidth supply

STAMFORD, USA: The upcoming flu season highlights the need for organizations to have pandemic plans in place, but work-at-home (WAH) strategies may be in jeopardy as residential Internet bandwidth supply may not meet demand, according to Gartner Inc.

According to the Center for Disease Control, the rule of thumb for pandemic planning is that 40 percent of the workforce will not be in the workplace for an extended period of time.

Eric Paulak, managing vice president, Gartner, said: “All of the telecommunications carriers say their wide area networks (WANs) can handle the added capacity of a 40 percent increase. That’s fine for their backbone network, but the problem lies in what is referred to as the “edge” or “last mile” in the residential Internet access loop."

"Within the switching office, surges in demand will overload the local connection to the backbone networks, because carriers typically do not design for excess residential capacity,” Paulak adds.

WAH Internet usage for commercial purposes typically takes place in the daytime, when consumer traffic is at a lull. The problem arises during an emergency, such as a pandemic, because consumer Internet usage will be happening at the same time as WAH usage, mainly because children will be home from school (who drive the bandwidth ratios today) and, therefore, using the Internet as they would during the evening.

DSL users are vulnerable to oversubscription, a condition in which potentially dozens of users share a single digital subscriber access multiplexer (DSLAM) connection to the backbone. This is not easy to remedy during an unexpected surge in last-mile demand.

John Girard, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said: “The bottom line is that the last-mile DSL and cable modem networks are where remote access falls apart. Backbones will be affected, but the network edge will crash. The carriers are encouraging organizations to use third-generation (3G) or other nontethered access as a backup/emergency solution to defend against these last-mile failures."

"However, this solution could lead to wireless system overload, so the problem is not solved, it is merely moved,” said . “Therefore, enterprises need to consider all three Internet access solutions when trying to work out what performs best in a given emergency situation,” Girard adds.

Gartner suggests three possible alternatives to improve Internet bandwidth for WAH strategies:

When employees are forced to work from home, they lose the benefits provided by their office WAN optimization controller (WOC). Some organizations are deploying software WOC client software on every laptop to help mitigate the bandwidth and latency issues. On a congested network, a SoftWOC can make the most of the little bandwidth available with 80-90 percent reductions for many applications.

If it’s only necessary to accelerate browser-based applications, or if software cannot be installed on an employee's home computer, a second solution is to use client applets that work with data-center-resident application delivery controllers or WOCs.

“These browser applets are zero-footprint installations (ActiveX or JavaScript) that can significantly reduce bandwidth and latency-induced performance problems and may be enough to make some employees productive,” said Joe Skorupa, research vice president at Gartner.

A third solution is to bypass the wired last mile altogether and switch to a wireless connection, such as 3G or WiMAX, or satellite. In contrast to these wireless offerings, new or expanded wired broadband services can take weeks to deliver under normal circumstances.

However, while last-mile bypass may fix the access network problem, it won't fix the common latency-induced problems that arise during surges of unplanned emergency access. In an emergency, always assume that wireless services will be oversubscribed.

“The impact is that all the WAH strategies being implemented by organizations will likely not work,” said Roberta Witty, research vice president at Gartner.

“Therefore organizations need to set up a variety of strategies for WAH including pandemic and WAH impact planning in all negotiations with network service providers, deciding in advance which business operations require heavy Internet usage and possibly staggering hours of operation to increase the chance of getting the needed bandwidth.”