First the General Accountability Office sounded the alarm about a flu pandemic and its potential to cripple the Internet, and now one of the IT industry’s preeminent analyst groups is adding its voice to the alarm.

Last week, Gartner raised serious concerns about companies that are depending on employees working remotely if flu overwhelms most offices.

For years now, industrial hygienists and safety managers have been warning companies to come up with a realistic plan for contending with a flu epidemic. The avian flu that made the rounds a few years ago prompted much of the concern.

When that pandemic never materialized, many organizations chalked up the warnings as hype and hysteria. Few companies put flu on their radar screens, and even fewer made actual plans for coping with the illnesses’ impact on business.

As cases of flu proliferate, many companies are falling back on telecommuting as a way to keep sick folks out of the workplace.

But this tactic may have some serious limits, say both the GAO and Gartner. Workers won’t be the only ones trying to do their jobs from home. Students, a group that’s being particularly hard hit by swine flu, will also be staying home when ill or when their schools are closed because of an overwhelming number of teacher or student absences.

Work-at-home (WAH) strategies will likely be in jeopardy because residential Internet bandwidth supply may not meet demand, according to both the GAO and Gartner.

According to the Center for Disease Control, the rule of thumb for pandemic planning is that 40% of the workforce won’t be in the workplace for some extended time.

“All of the telecommunications carriers say their wide area networks (WANs) can handle the added capacity of a 40% increase. That’s fine for their backbone network, but the problem lies in what is referred to as the ‘edge’ or ‘last mile’ in the residential Internet access loop,” said Eric Paulak, managing vice president at Gartner. “Within the switching office, surges in demand will overload the local connection to the backbone networks, because carriers typically do not design for excess residential capacity.”

WAH Internet usage for commercial purposes typically takes place in the daytime, when consumer traffic is at a lull. The problem arises during an emergency, such as a pandemic, because consumer Internet usage will be happening at the same time as WAH usage, mainly because children will be home from school and using the Internet as they would during the evening.

DSL users are vulnerable to over-subscription, a condition in which potentially dozens of users share a single digital subscriber access multiplexer (DSLAM) connection to the backbone. This is not easy to remedy during an unexpected surge in last-mile demand.

Gartner’s proposed workarounds for the situation:

1. When employees are forced to work from home, they lose the benefits provided by their office WAN optimization controller (WOC). Some organizations are deploying software WOC client software on every laptop to help mitigate the bandwidth and latency issues. On a congested network, a SoftWOC can make the most of the little bandwidth available with 80-90% reductions for many applications.
2. If it’s only necessary to accelerate browser-based applications, or if software cannot be installed on an employee’s home computer, a second solution is to use client applets that work with data-center-resident application delivery controllers or WOCs. “These browser applets are zero-footprint installations (ActiveX or JavaScript) that can significantly reduce bandwidth and latency-induced performance problems and may be enough to make some employees productive,” said Joe Skorupa, research vice president at Gartner.
3. If all else fails, then you might do well to bypass the wired last mile altogether and switch to a wireless connection, such as 3G or WiMAX, or satellite. In contrast to these wireless offerings, new or expanded wired broadband services can take weeks to deliver under normal circumstances. However, while last-mile bypass may fix the access network problem, it won’t fix the common latency-induced problems that arise during surges of unplanned emergency access. In an emergency, always assume that wireless services will be oversubscribed.

The bottom line: WAH strategies could fail if you’re counting on residential bandwidth to carry the load. For business critical applications, having a realistic backup to the backup plan should be part of the pandemic response scenario.

Tags: flu, Gartner, General Accountability Office, Pandemic, swine flu, telecommuting, work at home