With all the hype about Monaco’s new fi ber optic launch, I’ve been reminiscent of my offi ce back in Miami some 20 years ago. I had just installed the then leading technology in data connectivity—the T1 line developed by AT&T—and what a diff erence it made.
At the time, the integrated line carrying both voice and data traffi c simultaneously was described as “an important step forward in delivering higher speed connections” with an aggregate speed of 1.544 megabits per second.
Compare that to the standard modem transferring voice and data at a mere 56 kilobits per second—that’s about ten thousand times slower than the fastest consumer internet connections today.
It is connectivity that will drive our workforce in a post-pandemic world. Pre-Covid, 5% of full-time employees with offi ce jobs in the U.S. worked mostly from home but this fi gure is expected to rise 20-30% post-pandemic.
As Monaco’s Chief Digital Offi cer Fréderic Genta says on page 19, “Fiber is a foundation of our digital power capability and a real asset in a Covid and post-Covid world. Monaco residents will have better Wi-Fi, which responds to the needs of working from home, video conferencing and performance.”
And as more staff work remotely, companies have also been told to prepare by migrating workloads to the cloud as soon as possible. In Monaco, that opportunity is coming in a few months with the launch of the sovereign cloud. “A digitized company achieves 10% more turnover and 25% more margin,” Genta reveals. “We want to make Monaco future proof with the cloud as an act of economic and sovereign synergy.”
He adds, “Fiber, 5G and the cloud are the foundations of the Monaco model in a digital world. The launch of fi ber in the Principality is an essential step.”
In the technological timeline, T1 in Miami was a lifetime ago.