Is slow broadband costing you $$$ in lost productivity and driving your staff insane?
From a business perspective there is really only one serious reason for having superfast broadband and that is Productivity!
I see businesses every day who sacrifice productivity on a large scale for want of adequate internet. Staff hate slow internet too. Some staff stop using critical custom web applications simply because it just takes too long.
This is mostly due to Management or IT not keeping up with the real world of staff web usage. The internet plan they put in place three years ago is now totally inadequate. The number of people has increased but more importantly the amount of work they do using the internet bandwidth has grown exponentially. All the projections say it will grow even faster over the next few years as business embraces cloud technology for software deployment and data storage.
Microsoft expects the majority of MS Office use will be cloud based by 2017. The Piapplications modular web applications covered in another story in this newsletter (click here to view) are another good example. Web applications like Piapplications products are being increasingly used to increase productivity. But productivity can increase only if there is enough bandwidth available.
The equation is pretty simple. If you have one person in an office with a 20mB connection they have pretty fast internet. If you have 10 people using the same 20mB at the same time its workable but slow. If you have a hundred people using the same bandwidth at the same time everything goes at a snail's pace. You are back in the days of dial up internet where the standing joke was that www stood for world wide wait!
It is the accumulated wait time caused by slow internet that has a dramatic cost and reduces productivity!
Try this scenario in your office. Lets say your office has 50 people who use internet continually as part of their work output. Slow internet causes them each wait for just 3 minutes every hour. That's 150 minutes lost every hour across the whole staff. That's 20 hours a day or 100 hours a week lost to slow internet! Annually that is 5,200 hours. Lets presume the average hourly rate is $30. Over a year that amounts to $156,000 of accumulated lost time!
The cost to fix this problem is very small in comparison. Lets say you splurge an extra $6000 on internet which gives you back 2 of the 3 lost minutes.
For $6000 you get a 3% productivity improvement and a productivity dividend worth $100,000
Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of this issue I have seen was in Japan in 2012. Two of us were demonstrating a web application we had built for a very large Japanese corporation in their Tokyo head office. Everything was going well until 1.15pm when the application slowed to a standstill. We could not understand what had happened until one of our hosts told us that lunch hour had just finished and everyone was back to their desks and had gone on to the internet.
Hundreds of people were sitting watching nothing much happen and being paid to do it.
I see this phenomenon to some extent almost everywhere I visit customers in their offices.
Over the next few years the use of web based application and cloud based data storage will mean the demand on broadband will increase quickly.
Don't get caught with slow internet that is quietly costing you a fortune in lost productivity!
Bandwidth is cheap - Wages are not.