I’m lucky in that my company allows me to work from home every now and then. When I do though any productivity gains I might make because of no meetings, and fewer phonecalls and interruptions are partly offset by the slower speed of my home broadband connection and by the frequent loss of service I have to endure. I seem to be on a particularly flaky connection and regularly get chucked off the network by one or both of Orange and BT. What do I lose in terms of productivity? Probably no more than 5% but if I had to work from home more regularly that would start to add up. The quality and speed of home broadband connections in the UK is, I dare say, probably not the best it could be and probably holding back regular home workers. Some people still don’t have any broadband at all.

Still, it’s not as bad as in South Africa, where this week it was proved that a carrier pigeon is faster than that country’s broadband.