By Darian Germain
Even if only half of employees return to the office, they will bring with them video habits acquired during work-from-home that will dramatically impact corporate networks, according to traffic analysis by WebRTC peering company Peer5.
Peer 5 CEO and co-founder Hadar Weiss explains the above diagram.
“This is a model of how we think the LAN bandwidth is going to behave on the next few months.
“The x-axis is time, and the y-axis is bandwidth. And as it can expect there is a decrease in traffic after the pandemic hit – between 80% to 100% of previous levels. And the model anticipates 230 percent – 3.3 times the total bandwidth of what we had in January/February.
“We looked at the impact of 50% of employees returning to the office and loading the corporate network during a video webcast. Then we basically divide the 3.3 and/or 230% and you get to 65% more traffic on land, which is massive. We estimate that employees returning to the office with video habits will cause a significant increase in bandwidth use over the corporate network when they return perhaps in the first quarter of 2021.
“Obviously, no one can predict when this will happen, or exactly how – with global organizations, some regions may return before others. But they will come back, and they’ll be using the same live video they’ve used to stay connected with remote or staggered workplace employees but now it will traverse the corporate LAN, instead of the public Internet.
“What we’re suggesting to corporate network teams is to be wary, and to plan for, a likely higher level of consumption when employees return back to the office and their network’s inability to handle the additional traffic,” Weiss said.