Random Thursday thought: 5G will help support a major shift to homeworking partly because it will lower the costs of office infrastructure

The perfect office working balance is between 40-60%. You want to see people, collaborate, build bonds & otherwise be human.

But 40-60% of the time your time is better spent working without all that paraphernalia

As a business though, setting up offices costs money. Not just the real estate, but the office infrastructure. Desks. Chairs. Internet. Phones.

You need an IT company to provide setup, hardware, support etc etc.

The cost adds up each month, but so does the effort to support it. Special networks, dedicated infrastructure, people to support that infrastructure.

Currently you can't *not* provide that infrastructure, but home-working makes it much more of a deadweight cost

Enter 5G. If you have a) bazillions of internet points that can absorb b) bazillions of connected devices, then you can orientate your work IT infrastructure to the *device*, not to the office infrastructure.

Give your team a laptop & a phone and they can log in at work in just the same way as they can at home (cloud services with some authentication). [I'm also assuming soft phone adoption]

That should mean you don't need any dedicated office IT infrastructure

And without needing dedicated IT infrastructure, it's easier to reduce your size of office, or even not to have one and just hire a place for 2/5 days for everyone to come together.

The future office could be like the old meeting room - bookable for specific periods, interchangeable between groups of people because you don't need any of the specific infrastructure that you currently do.

Anyway, this thread was brought to you by someone where half the business love being together half the time, and the other half love working from home, and the only fixed costs that make it an issue are a) the office rent and b) sustaining the office IT infrastructure costs.

5G should enable me to reduce a) and remove b) almost entirely (or at least switch it to fully cloud based solutions)

Was that a... remotely original insight?