The People Keeping the Internet On
Keeping the internet running smoothly during the coronavirus crisis isn’t business as usual
Jamie Goate first started setting up phone connections and broadband links 20 years ago, when he troubleshot dial-up internet connections and routed copper phone wires back to junction boxes. But he didn’t get his biggest job until about a month ago.
The U.K. National Health Service (NHS) had called his current employer — Openreach, a subsidiary of the multinational telecommunications firm BT Group — to help it set up field hospitals for treating Covid-19 patients inside existing conference centers. “They didn’t really understand what they needed,” says Goate. “It was just a call to arms.” Goate arrived on the site within an hour of receiving the call for help. Normally, Openreach promises to deliver connectivity within 30 days. Goate’s team identified and delivered a solution within 15 hours, working around a fast-moving construction site.
It wasn’t a simple job: The team installed more than 1,000 voice over internet protocol (VoIP) telephones and an ultrafast Wi-Fi connection needed to control the ventilators keeping patients alive. It also created direct-routed connections to two other city-center hospitals so that patient data could be accessed at the field hospital through a…
