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Why the home-working boom could tumble London's skyscrapers

theguardian.com

19 pointsedward13 comments

No mention of how the UK's inner city housing is generally not suited for people to be working out of?

If this change happens it will take many years and will need the government to support it in Internet infrastructure and working from home regulations.

At the moment complaints and concerns are under the radar as we all know its temporary. Millions of people do not live in an abode where they could work from home from for the foreseeable future.

We have a housing crisis and small homes, plus shockingly unreliable Internet across many parts of the country including all over large cities.

I'm all for not propping up retail and turning it into accommodation, reducing how many homes landlords can own, getting rid of the buy to airbnb culture that's come in, advancing work from home technologies, reduction of commute and much more. This is not a simple fix though. Business has seen it works for some of them when they denied it would or wouldn't even consider it; and are now wanking over the the thought of not paying for office space and utilities* with very little concern for employee wellbeing.

The reality is you have living conditions for millions not suited to more than one person using it as an office and often not even one person. Young people especially coming into their first jobs will be vastly at risk of having to work and sleep in the same room.

*so many stories out there of companies expecting employees to pay for utilities being used in business operations due to lack of commuting costs (long before this too).

> unreliable Internet across many parts of the country including all over large cities.

How unreliable is it?

It varies widely, but plenty of people have WiFi that disconnects every half hour or so and is generally glitchy and slow enough you couldn't have a video call over it.

Most of that is caused by cheap ISP routers, WiFi interference, and DSL lines which have 30 second gaps when the SNR margin goes negative and they resync.

Most people just struggle on using it anyway - hit refresh whenever a web page gives an error, say "hello, hello, can you hear me?" over phone calls, etc. They've never used internet that works 100% reliably, so they don't even know anything's wrong.

There are often problems at the ISP end too. Those who buy ‘super fast’ lines find that they’re super slow, glitchy or down during peak periods - the times they actually want to use them.

There are a few ISPs who concentrate much more on stable connections - Zen and AA, for example. Selling a high theoretical speed has been much easier than selling reliability. Hopefully this changes are more people need their video meetings to happen without interruption.

Can you believe that most homes in Manchester City Centre have no fiber or cable connection, for historical reasons? Most of the suburbs are cabled, but not the central district! Basically ISPs make so much money providing custom “pipes” to businesses, nobody can be bothered to connect residential dwellings. And this is the 2nd or 3rd largest city in England.

Over the past three weeks, it happened at least 3 or 4 times that all our employees on Virgin Media in London would loose access to the internet for at least half a day. That’s easily about 10-20 people all around London so you would expect them to be somehow separated in sub networks.

Wow, that's really nuts.

I'm already pretty mad that internet access wouldn't work for 5 minutes ( I think it happened a week a year ago between 01:00 and 01:02 at night).

( Belgium fyi)

I lived in a borough of London and was unable to get anything more than 1.7MB/s down and 100KB/s up without paying for FTTP...this was in an apartment block with ~20 apartments, sort of a new build

Soon you should be able to use one of the newer 5g offerings that work over the air. It might be worth checking this is not already an option for you in fact.

We're using 3s new 5g service and it's £25/month (2 year contract) for what they claim is 400mb/s download speed, although in practice it fluctuates a lot but is always > 100mb/s.

This 5g offerings (like three) are completely unreliable, we tested one in the office in the City as a backup connection and it will go down when it was raining heavily

I hope we do start to go back to the more decentralized way of living, where smart highly educated workers don't concentrate in the largest cities and instead live all over the country. This is how it used to be 50 years ago.

I don't live in the UK but this is my hope too.

It won’t happen, but if it does: i’ll make sure to organise a great concert of all the smallest violins in the world.

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