Residential connectivity is critical for business continuity and helping the economy recover. In April of 2020, over half of America was working from home. In order to keep employees productive, companies have started paying for work from home needs, including new devices and network upgrades.
“The opportunity dramatically jumped starting in March,” says Chalan Aras, Vice President of Products at Citrix Systems. “If you look at what happened with the pandemic, the first priority was toilet paper and the second was how do you work from home. That really forced a lot of companies into panic mode. How do you move people home and then how do you deliver a great and consistent experience for their roles?”
This large step towards telework has created major demand for enterprise-grade services in a residential environment. Reliable connectivity and cyber-security are major concerns for employers, but ISPs and the work-from-home ecosystem can help fill these needs.
“There are certain roles need a consistent network; they may be talking to a patient or doing a broadcast on a major network,” notes Aras. “The experience of delivering a great work from home environment—whether it be network, device, prioritization, or quality of service—all of that has come to fore in huge volume.”
Early concerns regarding internet providers being able to support the influx of residential usage quickly eased as carriers adapted to the large volume of traffic. As enterprises assess the long-term impact of the new normal, it’s becoming clear that for some, remote work will be a permanent practice.
For ISPs and telecoms, providing options to facilitate a modern and distributed workforce could be a major financial boon. This includes support services for monitoring and managing connectivity, empowering remote IT administration, and premium upgrades to residential infrastructure.
There’s an opportunity for ISPs and the entire work-from-home ecosystem to serve the demands of companies migrating to the new normal.
“Our expectation is that this will be a very different mode of work rather than what we had pre-pandemic,” says Aras. “People will be working at work and some will be at home. It will be more flexible. There will be many different situations where people need to work from home or want to work from, so we expect this to continue.”