Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
According to a report from Uswitch1, internet outages are a growing problem in the UK with the number of people reporting outages of three or more hours almost doubling in the past year. The number of people affected increased from 12 million to an incredible 22 million (41% of UK consumers). The increase in faults means that 15% of people working from home were prevented from working due to an outage of three hours or more during the past year. Given the increase in people working from home, this has become a real problem for employers.The total number of hours of connectivity lost varied across the UK with people in Southampton losing 63 hours in the past year compared to Londoners losing 13.5 hours during the same period.
Ottie provides a continuous connection by switching to the best available mobile network during broadband outages.
Reliability is not the only problem that Britons face. There are still 50,000 premises without a Superfast broadband connection (>30Mbps) and these lines tend to have low upload speeds which can impact videoconferencing. The latest Ofcom broadband report2 does not address upload speeds except to say that a decent broadband connection is one that has a minimum upload speed of 1Mbps. However, this is generally not good enough for videoconferencing or sending large email attachments, making working from home difficult.
In 2024, Ottie will introduce a speed boost option, combining low download and upload speeds with a mobile network to boost overall speed.
Finally, Ottie addresses the issue of security for employees working from home. Most often business devices are connected to the same home network as games consoles, TVs and even less secure devices such as home automation, and these do pose a risk. For example, in 2017, a Wi-Fi connected aquarium thermometer was used to steal 10GB of data from a server on the same network.3 By separating personal and business devices by Ottie creating its own Wi-Fi 6 capable Wi-Fi hotspot with enforceable minimum password requirements, personal and business traffic are isolated from each other. Employers can even decide which devices can attach to Ottie.
Ottie increases security for employees working from home.
Ottie with its three superpowers (Reliability, Speed & Security) is the hero of remote worker connectivity. No matter what you do, Ottie keeps you connected.
References
2https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/multi-sector-research/infrastructure-research/summer-2023
