ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in an unprecedented overnight explosion in telecommuting. It has highlighted a new dependence on digital infrastructures and raised new questions regarding the resilience of internet connectivity as an alternative to travel. Pre-pandemic, we considered how telecommuting could offer an opportunity for resilience when travel was disrupted by weather extremes. We analysed five years' of recorded broadband speed variation across England and Wales in order to quantify the changing demand for internet access during the working day under adverse weather conditions. Slower broadband speeds, also known as contention, are an indication of increased demand. Thus, during the working day, contention is an indication that external factors like weather can influence the choice to telecommute instead of travel. A multilevel regression model is estimated to investigate the relationship between contention during the working day and weather, whilst controlling for background spatial and demographic differences in internet services. Emergent patterns suggest that even before the pandemic, online connectivity was in greater demand when travel was disrupted or at risk of disruption. Our research provides insights into the roles that both the supply of and the demand for transport and digital technologies might play in increasing resilience and maintaining productivity during severe weather and other disruptions as experience of both types of working has become so widespread. © 2022, The Author(s).
ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in an unprecedented overnight explosion in telecommuting. It has highlighted a new dependence on digital infrastructures and raised new questions regarding the resilience of internet connectivity as an alternative to travel. Pre-pandemic, we considered how telecommuting could offer an opportunity for resilience when travel was disrupted by weather extremes. We analysed five years’ of recorded broadband speed variation across England and Wales in order to quantify the changing demand for internet access during the working day under adverse weather conditions. Slower broadband speeds, also known as contention, are an indication of increased demand. Thus, during the working day, contention is an indication that external factors like weather can influence the choice to telecommute instead of travel. A multilevel regression model is estimated to investigate the relationship between contention during the working day and weather, whilst controlling for background spatial and demographic differences in internet services. Emergent patterns suggest that even before the pandemic, online connectivity was in greater demand when travel was disrupted or at risk of disruption. Our research provides insights into the roles that both the supply of and the demand for transport and digital technologies might play in increasing resilience and maintaining productivity during severe weather and other disruptions as experience of both types of working has become so widespread. © 2022, The Author(s).
ABSTRACT
This article offers a new perspective on telecommuting from the viewpoint of the complex web of digital divides. Using the United Kingdom as a case study, this article studies how the quality and reliability of Internet services, as reflected in experienced Internet upload speeds during the spring 2020 lockdown, might reinforce or redress the spatial and social dimensions of digital divisions. Fast, reliable Internet connections are necessary for the population to be able to work from home. Although not every place hosts individuals in occupations that allow for telecommuting or with the necessary skills to effectively use the Internet to telecommute, good Internet connectivity is also essential to local economic resilience in a period like the current pandemic. Employing data on individual broadband speed tests and state-of-the-art time series clustering methods, we create clusters of UK local authorities with similar temporal signatures of experienced upload speeds. We then associate these clusters of local authorities with their socioeconomic and geographic characteristics to explore how they overlap with or diverge from the existing economic and digital geography of the United Kingdom. Our analysis enables us to better understand how the spatial and social distributions of both occupations and online accessibility intersect to enable or hinder the practice of telecommuting at a time of extreme demand.