Getting up to speed

King Sturge's Connectivity report forms part of wider research into the design of the office building of the future. One of its conclusions is that landlords' willingness to invest in the modern technology, which increases the efficiency of their tenants' internet access, will be crucial to their success in the coming years

Though in Poland the advent of 'the new office' and other flexible working practices is deemed to be some way off, the era the country is about to enter as part of Europe, increases the relevance of reports such as this. Its findings however are based on the UK commercial real estate market, clearly at a more advanced stage of development than Poland's. Chris Grzesik King Sturge's Managing Director in Poland, suggests that some of the problems highlighted in the report might not become as acute in Warsaw and beyond.

Satisfaction
"The office stock in the city of London is ten times that of Warsaw, so there you do have problems, in that not all tenants have excellent access to the internet and broadband. In Poland however, to some extent we've been able to make a quantum leap, because in 1989 there were virtually no office buildings, so developers here have been much more prepared for the internet revolution. There is a larger degree of satisfaction here, than in the UK," he says.
The report nonetheless found that compared to 2001, when 67 per cent of its respondents were dissatisfied with their speed of access to the internet, the figure for 2003 is a significantly reduced 25 per cent, caused primarily by the boom in supply of connectivity to users that has occurred in the UK.

Not just bricks and mortar
Companies' evolving business practices, whereby they run their own web sites for instance, mean that the relationship between landlord and tenant is changing, and the latter will have higher expectations of the former's ability to provide broadband, web hosting, videoconferencing and telephone services over the next few years. Landlords however currently offer very few of these services to tenants, and a section of the report strongly recommends that they reconsider their attitudes on the matter, if they are not to be left behind.
The expected increase in home-working in the next few years will put added pressure on landlords to refine the services present in their buildings, the report claims.
One area in which it sees growth is wireless networking within buildings, which is currently available on a small-scale but as its popularity increases, larger-scale implementations will become more prevalent. This could have far-reaching implications for the management and design of buildings, in that the reels of cabling currently winding around the average office block, will gradually disappear.