Judging from the movies we watched such as Outbreak and Contagion people did see this coming, but I am not so sure the general population ever thought it could happen to them and that the consequences would happen so fast. As I was walking through the produce isle and seeing that chicken and milk were no longer options and I was staring down 3 weeks (at least) of shelter in place it became very real very fast.
I have worked from home for over 15 years now, so I know how to wake myself up, take a shower get dressed and commute all the way to the home office and treat it as if it were a different space. I actually function very well in this environment and what made it possible was the internet and WiFi improved that. I see virtually no difference when I am working on my AT&T 50 MB line versus being in the office.
The industry had planned on seeing gradual increases and had a plan with 5G cellular data combined with Wi-Fi 6 to ramp up capacity to meet the demand. And then we had a pandemic. We are just now getting the data on the shift in traffic patterns, but it looks dramatic. Here at ASSIA inc. (I contract with ASSIA through my LLC which is Nuventis), which supplies Artificial Intelligence driven cloud-based optimization solutions we are doing our best to analyze the change.
Last night everyone in the neighborhood was on a Zoom conference drinking wine and discussing the day. The plan is now to do that every day before dinner for the foreseeable future. Wi-Fi has become a life line for communications. In addition everyone I work with is now working from home. Even my friends who work in banking are working from home. It is rapid change and it will strain our networks because it is not possible to plan for change this fast.
The good news is that cloud based artificial intelligence / machine learning is built to handle this. People can’t react nearly as fast as AI to a rapidly changing environment. We don’t have time to implement new hardware, but we can use the tools provided with AI to optimize the environment we have today to deal with this.
We are willing to share our data and ideas on how to help in crisis. Please let us know if there is any way we can help.
Nuventis 