Is your Return to Office plan going to Fail and could 5G save it?
(This story was originally posted to LinkedIn on February 22, 2022 )
As organizations formulate their return to corporate offices in 2022, preparing for implementation of the hybrid workstyle has become a focal point for most. Companies are concentrating on not only how to ensure their people feel and are safe, but that they will be able to continue to work with their remote colleagues, partners and customers using technologies that have become pervasive during the pandemic. For the typical pre-pandemic office, this means a much broader deployment of video conferencing services and likely a much higher usage of voice services, than were in consistent use before. IDC recently predicted that 8:10 regularly scheduled meetings in Global 100 firms would use intelligent digital workspaces, augmented with visual technologies, by 2024. And while the challenge of getting these systems procured, deployed, tested and ready for use has become a focal point, a much harder to address underlying issue lurks in the walls of many of these facilities: a corporate network not capable of, or configured to, support the exponential increase of real-time voice and video traffic the return to the workplace will place on it.
The cost of provisioning bandwidth to facilitate pervasive room-based video (not to even mention PC-based usage) has often led to limited deployments of these services or are the root of repeated end user complaints of ‘poor experience’. Most of today’s corporate networks have not been designed to service the volume of demand for real-time, latency-sensitive data that the pandemic has established as the norm. Simultaneously connecting tens or hundreds of thousands of devices to real-time cloud services, via the traditional LAN and WAN network, were just not a core use case for most corporations in 2019. In fact, a significant number were still disabling PC-based voice and video services across their enterprise for this very reason.
While we’ve all been at home, we’ve been typically using consumer grade services, and they’ve stereotypically provided higher available speed to cloud services per active device than is provisioned in a corporate office. Bringing even a small percentage of those employees into an office environment and then trying to use the tools in the same fashion they have been at home, has the real possibility of bringing a corporate office network to its knees, or best case, make the end user session so bad they can’t work.
Network architectures exist that can help relieve these challenges, architectures with local internet breakouts that can be provisioned and next generation network architectures such as SD-WAN can be implemented, but all these take time to design, deploy, provision, secure etc.… a long runway for companies keen to get people back into the office.
So, could 5G be the answer?
Rather than re- architecting the corporate network, is provisioning employees with 5G-enabled notebooks the smarter, faster and more scalable way to go? Bypassing the corporate network and enabling unobstructed connection to cloud services removes corporate bottlenecks and can be deployed at a much more rapid and granular pace than network-wide upgrades. It also provides network capacity flexibility, relieving the corporate network from having to be sized for maximum potential occupancy and reserving it for a more minimal set of on-network activity that is consistent and predictable.
The Intel 5G Solution 5000 M.2 announced at Computex in May 2021 is one such solution which has since been taken to market by most of the major enterprise notebook vendors including Dell, Lenovo and HP.
We’ve all heard about the promise of 5G for some years now, with all its speed for our phones and the millions of IoT devices it’s going to enabled to be connected to the cloud, but could it be the humble laptop we’ve been carrying in our bags for all those years and the shadow of a global pandemic that will really bring 5G to the corporate enterprise and put it to work? I predict it may be so.
