Serial entrepreneur and IT channel luminary Bevan Slattery has called on the NBN Co to temporarily increase connectivity virtual circuit (CVC) capacity provided to existing residential NBN bundles.
Slattery wrote on LinkedIn addressing Prime Minister Scott Morrison, NBN Co chief Stephen Rue and chairman Ziggy Switkowski “on behalf of a nation in turmoil”.
“Can [NBN Co] please temporarily double or even triple the amount of CVC capacity that is provided under the existing NBN residential bundles to allow for a nation that is going to be doing everything online at the same time in the VERY near future,” the LinkedIn post read.
“Parents will be working from home, while kids will be studying at home - both using video, placing massive demands on providers who have offered plans that are designed for normal conditions. I'll shout you a bloody cold beer when I next see you if you could!”
As of midday today, the post has garnered more than 1000 reactions and dozens of comments.
Speaking to CRN, Slattery said households having parents needing to work from home and students having to do schoolwork from home as well would result in staggering increases in demand.
In addition, he also reached out to streaming service providers to look into reducing the resolutions of their programming to ease demand on bandwidth.
The LinkedIn posts' comments largely agreed with Slattery, saying that increasing CVC capacity would help alleviate “remote worker pain”, that their expensive 100 Mbps plans are getting sluggish, and that the NBN was built to address situations like this.
One commenter said the NBN should have already offered the increases already given that most of the developed world already lets their networks upscale and downscale capacity as needed.
Some however didn’t necessarily agree, with one saying that increased capacity won’t mean anything when their copper lines are corroded, while another said making the price of CVC cheaper will just overwhelm the network even further.
