Web hosting users ‘could add to internet congestion’

Web hosting users operating from home could add to the problem of internet "congestion". According to a recent Gartner report, instances where there are high levels of telecommunication use or home working could slow down and even overload parts of the internet.

Gartner warned that if many start to work from home because of illness, they may put a strain on their local internet to the extent that they could overload the connection, leaving them without the internet at all.

Richard Webb, a directing analyst at Infonetics Research, explained that it is similar to the ways in which motorways work: "You can create congestion and traffic which just can’t move and can’t get anywhere, so you can overload local portions of a network by having concentrated traffic in a certain physical geography."

Gartner’s Centre for Disease Control believes that, with pandemic planning, it is likely that two-fifths (40 per cent) of employees will not be in the workplace for an extended period of time.

Written by Freddie Simmonds.