“The heat has turned up,” said Dan Harrison, president of Up-Front Technologies, a Denver-based telecommunications consultant. “A lot of companies are thinking about moving to a remote workforce but are not ready to do that. It’s not as simple as taking home a telephone and they’re good to go, because you’re now dealing with variable bandwidth. Whereas before you could lock yourself into a conference room and know you had excellent connectivity, your people are now in places where you don’t control the bandwidth, you don’t control the background, and you don’t control the distrac- tions.” Companies’ first step is to require all employees conduct a home speed test to determine whether their broadband can handle the applications, including voice and video, Harrison said. The next steps will depend upon what you learn from that test. Given the pervasive footprint of broadband connec- tivity, most employees likely will meet the standard. Those that do not will need to upgrade if alter- nate broadband providers are available or consider alternative arrangements, such as returning to the office or working in a nearby locale with high-speed connectivity. Once high-speed broadband is available, UCaaS and a host of other “as-a-Service” offerings will be within reach, technologically. While the return-to-office movement has already begun, Harrison’s guidance still rings true. “UCaaS can get stood up very quickly,” said Stratosphere Networks’ Karczewski. “I’ve seen UCaaS get stood up in a couple of weeks or even a couple of days, depending on the situation. The biggest part is the porting of numbers, which is usually the longest phase of the deployment. But you can forward those numbers to your UCaaS solution earlier, even though all the features might not be immediately available.” 250 249% % 86% Surge in customer interest at start of COVID 200% 197% 212% 174% 159% 156% 150% 148% 163% 163% 140% 122% 129% 131% 103% 100 100% 114% % 107% NOV DEC JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC JAN FEB MAR APR 2018 2018 2019 2019 2019 2019 2019 2019 2019 2019 2019 2019 2019 2019 2020 2020 2020 2020 100% 103% 122% 107% 159% 129% 148% 114% 140% 156% 163% 197% 177% 131% 174% 163% 249% 212% Source: AVANT Assesment Data Copyright © 2020 AVANT Communications, Inc. 17