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Surprise: if you work from home you need the Internet

Buffer-rage sends Aussies out to experience road rage

In surprising-no-really-it's-surprising research from NBN Co, Australians with slow internet services apparently get frustrated trying to work from home, so they unnecessarily condemn themselves to the frustration of commuting instead.

In a study announced here, the network builder has slung some funds in the direction of Evolve Research to quiz 4,098 Australians about how they use the Internet.

Buffer-rage is a big thing, the research found: 50 per cent expressed irritation at their home service and identified video buffering and dropouts during video calls as particular bugbears.

Work-from-home respondents to the study are also harder to please, reporting higher levels of dissatisfaction with their home 'net connections than the population at large. However, among the work from home crowd, performance (24 per cent dissatisfied with speed, and the same dissatisfied with reliability) rated just below cost (26 per cent dissatisfied), while download allowances were only a minor irritant (14 per cent of those working from home).

If it weren't for that, the study claims, one-third of punters said they'd work from home more often. Those that regularly work from home almost universally describe the Internet as important or vital to them (about 93 per cent), while 74 per cent of all respondents used the same description.

In an interesting counterpoint to NBN Co's research, US researchers the Analysis Group have found that American cities with fibre-to-the-home generate better per-capita GDP than those without.

As noted in the Washington Post, “cities with gigabit connections reported 1.1 per cent higher per-capita GDP than their slower counterparts”.

The research doesn't quantify how much of that could be attributed to working from home, which presumably will still get some kind of kick along even in Australian homes that suffer from connection to the slower FTTN preferred by the federal government. ®

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