In a 71-page report issued this week, the US GAO said that it was concerned that, with millions of workers working from home, the last mile broadband system - the existing delivery infrastructure of the internet - may get severely overloaded and so threaten its security plus integrity.
Most SME business and domestic broadband connections in the UK, in common with North America, share their access to their local switch, with contention ratios of 20, 30 and even 50:1 being the norm.
The situation is similar to the telephony network, Infosecurity notes, meaning that, if everyone in a street lifts their receiver to make call, not everyone will get a dial tone.
The GAO report correctly identifies this potential problem, reasoning that if many more people than normal work from home, their internet access speeds will slow to a crawl.
The report says that most US government agencies have not developed plans to to address this potential congestion issue and may lack clear authority to act.
The Gartner Group has also picked up on the report and warned that home working strategies for organisations "may be in jeopardy as residential internet bandwidth supply may not meet demand."
Eric Paulak, Gartner's managing vice president said that, because residential broadband users are effectively sharing a single DSLAM (digital subscriber line access multiplexer) at the local switch, this could contribute to congestion issues..
“All of the telecommunications carriers say their wide area networks (WANs) can handle the added capacity of a 40% increase. That’s fine for their backbone network, but the problem lies in what is referred to as the “edge” or “last mile” in the residential internet access loop,” he said.
“Within the switching office, surges in demand will overload the local connection to the backbone networks, because carriers typically do not design for excess residential capacity,” he added.
Interestingly, Gartner based its observations on a US Centres for Disease Control planning guideline that assumes that 40% of the workforce might not be in their workplace for an extended period of time during a pandemic.
These guidelines are similar to the UK's Audit and Assessment Framework for Major Incident Planning, Infosecurity notes, although the UK government has never, it seems, got around to analysing what would happen IT-wise in the event of a pandemic.
Gartner has suggested three ways businesses can improve bandwidth for work-at-home employees during a pandemic:
- Consider deploying WAN optimisation controller software on every laptop used at home to mitigate bandwidth and latency problems. This software can reduce the bandwidth needed for many applications by as much as 90%.
- Install client applets that work with data centre application delivery controllers or with WAN optimisation controller software to reduce network performance bottlenecks.
- Bypass the wired last mile by switching to a wireless connection such as 3G or satellite. Even so, Gartner said that businesses may also assume that 3G/wireless services might also be over-used in an emergency.
Infosecurity hosted a webinar last month in which the topic of pandemic planning, and the issues raised by the US GAO report and the Gartner Group were discussed in some depth.
In the webinar, entitled `Pandemic planning - is your security and IT up to the challenge?' Check Point and 2e2 officials, as well as a senior Quocirca analyst, noted that large numbers of people working from home would create difficult working conditions for companies.
The overall conclusion from the webinar, however, was that, with enough forward planning, both governments and companies could work around most of the technical and logistical problems.