UK ISPs: ‘Ready to handle bandwidth demands’
March 11, 2020
In response to the various questions about the ability of ISPs to handle increased demand that may result from Covid-19, trade body ISPA UK, has said that they are ready to handle any potential extra bandwidth.
“The possibility of the UK having to remotely work over the next few months has led to questions about the ability of ISPs to handle the additional workload of employees working from their homes,” commented Andrew Glover, Chair of the Internet Services Providers’ Association.
“ISPs are ready to handle any potential extra bandwidth and consistently assess the demands that are being put on their networks. Businesses and companies will need to ensure that their own systems, e.g., their server setup, support a potentially significant increase in remote connections to accommodate the potential increase in traffic from their employees,” he advised.
According to ISPA UK, its members’ networks are built to support ‘evening peak’ capacity, which generally means at least ten times the typical daytime (working hours) demand, driven by streaming video, sports content etc. The types of applications that people use heavily in the evenings at home – such as Facebook, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Sky Go etc – use more bandwidth than typical working tools such as emails, document collaboration software or even voice and video conferencing.