The ‘polo mint’ effect: a breath of fresh air for small businesses

Are we witnessing the end of the city centre and the beginning of a new type of business hub?

In the year ahead, 50% more office employees will work from home compared with before the pandemic, according to our research . The mornings spent lodged under someone’s elbow on a train and scrambling for a latte before 9am may be over for many. The office might still exist, but it may not be the first destination of choice.

Entering a new era of broadband

Local businesses are seeing a renaissance. The working week may no longer revolves around the city centre. Instead, new neighbourhood hubs are springing up across the UK. For the corner shops, convenience stores and cafes to sustain this new footfall, they need powerful connectivity to cement lasting change.

The new frontier in connectivity has the potential to do just this. It can enliven once forgotten communities and redistribute the working day to previously peripheral urban areas.

Local is the new global. A new wave of broadband solutions is here to supercharge revived neighbourhoods with powerful connectivity.

Come together, right now, over FTTP

By 2023, chat-based collaboration tools are set to overtake the use of internal email, according to CCS Insights⁴. New technologies are replacing old favourites at a rapid rate, but 40% of businesses⁵ still feel they need to upgrade their technology to accommodate the change in office and remote working.

As organisations revise their budgets, it’s not just video conferencing and collaboration technology that will take centre stage. We believe that All this technology needs superfast connectivity to support it, otherwise it’s just cash down the drain.

Fibre to the Premise (FTTP) is the latest capability to help businesses take a quantum leap in speed and reliability. It’s fast fibre that delivers simple and fast connectivity straight to your door, reducing latency, service loss, and buffering issues. It’s not just about eliminating the last mile, but going the extra.

Crunch time for cloud computing

Half of large firms are predicted to have more than 50% of their applications in the public cloud by 2023⁶. Legacy technology is out the window, and businesses are looking to innovate as quickly as possible.

While cloud migration can boost employee productivity⁷, it can also have the added benefit of enabling other smart technologies. In the next few years, it’s predicted there’ll be a rise in smart network assistants⁸ that help users understand and optimise network performance, providing real-time analysis of usage. AI and machine learning technologies will certainly see a jump in popularity in order to help with any technology gap that comes from remote working.

However, this doesn’t mean a shift to the cloud is simple. Businesses are looking for a way to ease the transition with networks that integrate easily with cloud-based environments. They want flexibility, speed and automation. Organisations hoping to make large strides in their transformation projects need to check their connectivity before they take the jump – or risk a costly and complicated move to the cloud.

Software-Defined Networking in a Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) can help businesses take two steps forward with a cloud-first solution. While legacy WAN technology is increasingly unfit for purpose, SD-WAN is built around agility, integrating easily with cloud-based environments, and giving network managers greater control.

For businesses looking to eliminate any connectivity issues, we believe a network fit for the cloud is crucial.

In the year ahead, 50% more office employees will work from home compared with before the pandemic,

The rural renaissance

The ‘polo mint’ effect is just the beginning. Soon, we believe that not just towns and suburbia, but rural areas will reap the benefits of superfast broadband. Vodafone is partnering with Britain’s other top networks to launch the Shared Rural Network (SRN)⁴. This first-of-its-kind project will aim to transform mobile coverage across the country and set the standard on the world stage. It brings with it the promise of better indoor coverage in around 1.2 million homes and businesses, hoping to banish poor connectivity in the British countryside and offer new ways of working to even the most remote locations.

We’re on the edge of a new frontier for connectivity that enables collaboration, competitive working and profit to previously underserved areas. This doesn’t just mean leaving the sardine commute behind. It offers local towns the chance to attract once die-hard city dwellers. The city bubble might soon burst.

Find out more about how working with Vodafone can open up new possibilities for connectivity

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The ‘polo mint’ effect: a breath of fresh air for small businesses