Work from anywhere

The events of the last three years have definitely changed the way the world works, literally how it works, prior to COVID companies had lots of office space and whilst companies often had a Work From Home (WFH) policy unless you were a remote or home based employee meant people were typically in the office 2-3 days a week. Some companies just had no WFH policy.

Now the world has really returned to a new normal the concept of work from anywhere has really taken off, personally I've seen that in hiring people, gone are the days where you can say to people you have to be in the office X days a week or you have to be based in this country, if you did that you simply wouldn't be able to hire people, this is particularly true in tech, brought on by a world wide shortage of people in tech. This shortage has been exacerbated by events in Ukraine.

There are many stories of companies fighting this new normal Goldman Sachs is one of those most vocal about it, but in the words of many they need to "read the room". Plenty of companies have downsized office space both during and after COVID, which has had another effect on smaller businesses that used to rely on those people being in the office, but the world has evolved and we have to adapt as employers and employees.

One key part of this actually working is infrastructure, both the corporate IT and location internet connectivity. There are many stories of those companies who had no concept of WFH when COVID first hit scrambling to figure out how to keep their business running. Life was not plane sailing for those at the other end of the spectrum who had a mature WFH policy, they had to solve challenges like how to on-board new employees remotely as typically that initial on-boarding always took place in an office. Today it is not uncommon for new devices such as laptops to be shipped to a new starter they turn it on and goes off and configures itself over the internet, such technology was always available its use has become far more mainstream now.

A challenge in a lot of countries has also been internet connectivity, there were stories of what you would consider to be leading connected countries struggling, the UK is an example where such stories came out where day time traffic showed a 35% to 60% increase. It also pushed to the limit particularly upload bandwidth.

Spain is an interesting case, as a country it basically skipped generation one of aDSL and has a Fibre To The Home (FTTH) policy and it is from what I can see universal across Spain you can goto a lovely white pueblo in the middle of nowhere and see a sign like this offering FTTH

In our many house moves I've also seen this, before we bought our current place we were renting we moved in and no fibre, so one of the local providers olivenet ran 300 meters of fibre to our house from the nearest junction box and then Cat6E cabling thru the ducting inside the house, took them all day, has anyone ever seen this kind of thing anywhere else in the world?

The price in Spain is also amazing value for €39.99 a month you can get 500Mb full duplex and I really do mean up and down, my line speed is around 200Mb full duplex which is way more than most normal people can use. Download does tend to vary depending on time of day but typically it looks like this.

This compares very poorly with a lot of other countries, the UK is a long way from this still relying on the old copper wire for the last mile even with Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC), in this scenario you get something like 60Mb downstream and around 25Mb upstream.

France still has work to do as well but there is a plan to drive FTTH and hit some very aggressive targets over the next few years extending fibre to everyone by 2025. Personally I'm very much looking forward to this as our house in France is struggling with something around 10Mb downstream and 1Mb upstream as you can see. To be honest I'd sacrifice download performance for improved upload performance. 

The UK doesn't seem to have a plan to match what is happening in Spain and France, how can a country like the UK hope to compete on the world stage when infrastructure like this is not available?

What the last three years have definitely shown us is the need to have the basic infrastructure as well as tools and supporting technology in place.

 

Some countries are also making it attractive for companies and workers to move, Spain has a number of incentives in this regard, you have the Beckham Law as it is known, Digital Nomad visa has been promised and Andalucia has just made significant changes to the tax regime, more on these in later blogs. Without the basic infrastructure any of these are meaningless.