Confinement (voluntary or not), online work and projects

Luis -

it is not a question of access but rather quality of service. If both my son and I are utilizing very high bandwidth services and both have good use cases for needing to use those, then regardless of how "fat" the pipe is coming in to the house, we could end up saturating it. I know some folks have investigated multiple ISPs as one option - thus segregating different users between different distinct providers...

Kiron

Dear Peter,

What I do see is more people becoming self employed and subcontracting as organizations policies become about reducing the amount of permanent employee they have as they do not have to pay employer social service tax, pension and other benefits such as health and dental.

Just like Software As a Service and cloud technologies organizations are increasingly seeing people as resources (see previous posts about that definition and topic).

As a result the establishment of a home office would come out of the 'employees' pocket and not the organizations. The employee may not even be paid per hour but based upon the completion of a specific task or project.

Daire

I have been observing this trend over the last ten years or so. It provides opportunity in exchange for the risk especially for the experienced professional - not so much for the trainee and the lower level employees.

There are many companies which are now operating as "temporary service providers" (bums in seats). They sell the services, provide professional insurance coverage, some administrative duties and then recruit the independents to provide the service (I use one).
I've been operating as an independent contractor since 2000 but have some reservations as to sustainability
.
Way back corporations determined it was more effective to bring everyone under the same roof - economy of size if you will - and increased productivity through collaboration, integration, better communications, etc. IT has addressed many of these but not all. There will be some experiments but ultimately I think there will be a gradual return to normal - with specific exceptions.

Security will become a major consideration as will costs.

Dear Rami
Thank you for participating in this reflection and for your opinion

How long have people been confined?

Do you foresee changes over time?

Dear Kiron,

One tip is to use a cable internet connection as apposed to a wifi connection as you do not get the same drop off's in connection that you get using wifi.

You may not notice it due to buffering of data stream or using packet data protocol applications but with wifi it happens more often that not.

Also ISP do data throttling especially in areas with high bandwidth use. This is usually done at their Network Operation Centre (NOC) in order to balance traffic across their network. As a result the ripple effect can cause a slow down in broadband speeds.

The reason for this is product segmentation by the ISP. When DSL was first rolled out there was only one speed, fast. But in order for ISP to increase revenue, they started offering different packages and different prices.

Nowadays it is about triple, quad play services and these increases the demand on bandwidth. If you use IPTV then this significantly decreases the amount of available bandwidth.

So it is true to say that multiple devices connected to the same pipe will slow down each other by fighting for available bandwidth.

Daire

Dear Peter
Thank you for sharing your opinion with us

What will be the "new normal"?

Luis

In BC, we've been like thos for almost 2 weeks now but construction is going on as usual, no interruption while taking the necessary precautions while in Quebec for example, all construction projects were instructed to shut down.

I can't foresee anything to be honest, we are living one day at a time.

RK

Thanks Daire -

Yes, I do try to go "hard-wired" as frequently as possible. I still remember my misbegotten youth spent fixing 10Base2 (yes, coax cable!) IP connections at my first employer using binary search to locate where breaks were happening in connectors. 10Base-T with Cat 5 took care of all of that...

Kiron

New normal - much the same as the old normal with just a couple millimeters along the evolution line.

We keep going around and around and with every rotation a minimal advance towards the object which remains beyond our understanding let alone our grasp.

If I knew the answer I would retire to a mountain top and give advice to the hoards seeking my wisdom :-)