John Linton .......for over a month with only HSPA and whatever internet facilities exist in the remote areas Annette and I are magnetically drawn to while on vacation. We leave in a few hours with the only forced lack of connection to Exetel's data bases and communications systems being the 23 hour direct flight from Sydney to Heathrow. After that we will have a 14.4 mbps HSPA service (or less) wherever the current build is available.
As someone who 'works from home' for all but 4 or 5 hours per 'week day' it isn't really going to make that much difference and Annette seldom goes to the office except for the monthly management reviews and an odd meeting with a supplier or service provider so it won't matter at all to her. And from observation of other companies and our own operations this is an even faster growing trend now than a year or so ago. I guess I have become used to having 'half' our personnel in Colombo and that Steve spends much less time in Sydney than he used to as well as having two engineers permanently working from their homes in the ACT and NSW's Central Coast. Perhaps its like VoIP - it seems a big risk but over some period of time you get so used to it that it happens without you really noticing. All the fears of 'unsafe' and unreliable' communications and irresponsible employees seem to have faded away just as all the 'fears' about VoIP are now barely rememberable.
When we had a 4 week vacation last year we used T-Mobile's HSPA in some quite remote places as we spent the majority of the time in NW Scotland and an off shore island with the rest of the time in very rural areas of England. We couldn't always get a signal but using HSPA made it much easier than always having to find a hotel with broadband and sitting in the car for an extra hour tapping keys on a note book was no more demanding than driving in UK traffic. So the days of needing an office and a 'secure' VPN connection are long gone and VoIP means that the vagaries of other countries billing systems no longer make long calls back to Australia an expensive luxury - it's now unbelievably cheap. Of course working from a fixed place (like 'home') doesn't require HSPA but having a true mobile office link (that is secure) is a major plus or all sorts of positions within a commercial enterprise....besides the obvious ones of 'on the road' reps and engineers.
Perhaps it is my age group but more and more of my business acquaintances appear to work from home or away from home more than they do from their offices and some now run their Australian businesses from outside Australia with one person I don't personally know but have corresponded with running his operations mostly from his boat in the Mediterranean. A nice vision to keep in the back of one's mind. It is a very broad representation of a wide range of people choosing not to work from an office and having no barriers to doing that.
It's pretty clear that the combination of mobile voice and data and VoIP not only make it practical to work from almost anywhere in the allegedly civilised world (and much of the uncivilised world) it makes it lower cost and removes travel times and costs as well. So undoubtedly, like VoIP, the number of people working from home will continue to increase and the variety of positions that could be 'home based' will also continue to increase. I have never looked at in detail in terms of the cost savings to the employee and the employer but I might do that in the near future particularly if our growth in sales people does materialise and if Exetel's other 9 products/services continue to grow as they have in the past requiring us to look for additional floor space.
Apart from having a holiday in some of the less accessible parts of England we will spend a day or so looking at LTE in a 'live' use environment in Germany and make some sort of decision on what we might be able to do to enhance our HSPA future offerings in Australia by starting up some sort of HSPA operation in the UK. I badly need the break and I'm certain that means many people who associate with me need a break from my presence. So I wish anyone who bothers to read my random thoughts an equally pleasant month in your lives.