
Why the home-working boom could tumble London's skyscrapers - edward
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/27/why-the-home-working-boom-could-tumble-londons-skyscrapers
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morelikeborelax
No mention of how the UK's inner city housing is generally not suited for
people to be working out of?

If this change happens it will take many years and will need the government to
support it in Internet infrastructure and working from home regulations.

At the moment complaints and concerns are under the radar as we all know its
temporary. Millions of people do not live in an abode where they could work
from home from for the foreseeable future.

We have a housing crisis and small homes, plus shockingly unreliable Internet
across many parts of the country including all over large cities.

I'm all for not propping up retail and turning it into accommodation, reducing
how many homes landlords can own, getting rid of the buy to airbnb culture
that's come in, advancing work from home technologies, reduction of commute
and much more. This is not a simple fix though. Business has seen it works for
some of them when they denied it would or wouldn't even consider it; and are
now wanking over the the thought of not paying for office space and utilities*
with very little concern for employee wellbeing.

The reality is you have living conditions for millions not suited to more than
one person using it as an office and often not even one person. Young people
especially coming into their first jobs will be vastly at risk of having to
work and sleep in the same room.

*so many stories out there of companies expecting employees to pay for utilities being used in business operations due to lack of commuting costs (long before this too).

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NicoJuicy
> unreliable Internet across many parts of the country including all over
> large cities.

How unreliable is it?

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londons_explore
It varies widely, but plenty of people have WiFi that disconnects every half
hour or so and is generally glitchy and slow enough you couldn't have a video
call over it.

Most of that is caused by cheap ISP routers, WiFi interference, and DSL lines
which have 30 second gaps when the SNR margin goes negative and they resync.

Most people just struggle on using it anyway - hit refresh whenever a web page
gives an error, say "hello, hello, can you hear me?" over phone calls, etc.
They've never used internet that works 100% reliably, so they don't even know
anything's wrong.

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tokamak-teapot
There are often problems at the ISP end too. Those who buy ‘super fast’ lines
find that they’re super slow, glitchy or down during peak periods - the times
they actually want to use them.

There are a few ISPs who concentrate much more on stable connections - Zen and
AA, for example. Selling a high theoretical speed has been much easier than
selling reliability. Hopefully this changes are more people need their video
meetings to happen without interruption.

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user_50123890
I hope we do start to go back to the more decentralized way of living, where
smart highly educated workers don't concentrate in the largest cities and
instead live all over the country. This is how it used to be 50 years ago.

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enygmata
I don't live in the UK but this is my hope too.

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toyg
It won’t happen, but if it does: i’ll make sure to organise a great concert of
all the smallest violins in the world.

