Colt continues to carefully monitor the spread and impact of Covid-19 around the world. Since the start of the outbreak we have made significant changes to our organisation to allow us to operate remotely, continue to deliver exceptional service and to support a major increase in bandwidth demand.
We are following World Health Organisation (WHO), Centre of Disease Control (CDC) and local authority advice globally and in the cities and regions affected. Our priority remains the safety of our employees, customers and partners.
What we're doing:
Our experienced BCM and Health & Safety teams continue to work around the clock to monitor and manage the situation.
We operate to the ISO 22301:2019 standard where all identified critical business functions have proven business continuity plans.
We operate a global network and has multiple operational centres around the world with strong and well-tested continuity plans.
We have remote working capabilities for employees in all regions, to ensure our service is as consistent as possible.
We are working closely with our critical supply chain to manage and mitigate any potential impact.
Our network
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have observed a significant shift in traffic on internet peering edge network points facing PTTs, home ISPs, content and cloud providers. We have the capacity to absorb this increase and continue to provision additional network capacity at different layers on our network:
Operations & service delivery
Previous restrictions on delivering and managing services have now been lifted in all countries but remain subject to local access restrictions.
This means that we are able to deliver services for all new customers and attend to all customer faults, including any service degradation, subject to access restrictions from customers, building owners or local authorities. Work will only be carried out where our employees or partners can fully comply with safety guidelines.
All these updates are subject to change at short notice, particularly if restrictions are put back into place or Covid-19 cases increase.
Frequently Asked Questions
We are able to deliver services for all new customers and attend to all customer faults, including service degradation, subject to access restrictions from customers, building owners or local authorities. Work will only be carried out where our employees or partners can fully comply with safety guidelines.
- We have reviewed the resilience of our critical suppliers and there is no business impact anticipated at this point. Our suppliers have Business Continuity Plans in place.
- We are continuing to monitor the situation and reviewing the status of our critical suppliers.
We have also seen a significant increase in voice traffic over our network. Colt has a high capacity voice backbone benefiting from our wholly owned fibre network – and our network has significant spare capacity and the ability to increase it quickly. We are seeing high traffic at voice interconnection points across Europe and are working with our partners to manage this. We have been able to re-route traffic or increase capacity to mitigate new peaks in demand and are proactively adding capacity for countries where we perceive there to be an imminent increase in traffic.
Number porting is operating business as usual in most countries, with restrictions in Portugal for the small number of cases where civil works are required.
All Colt offices are still operating a mandatory work from home policy for all employees able to work remotely, with the exception of Dalian where we are staggering a soft work from home policy for staff returning to the office. Additional checks and cleaning have been implemented for the safety of all those who need to be on-site.
Any return for the rest of our employees will be carefully planned and managed. We have also implemented guidelines for Colt employees and partners required to visit customer or third-party sites.
- For those who are required to visit Colt sites, we ask all visitors follow World Health Organisation hygiene practices and to consider the need for face to face meetings.
- Access to Colt sites is subject to local government restrictions and guidance
- We ask all visitors to confirm:
- That they have not contracted flu or have had flu-like symptoms, with a temperature above 37.5°C or a new and persistent cough
- They have not been or not being aware of having been, in close contact with a person affected by Covid-19
- Not having received communication from the authorities about close contact with a person infected by Covid-19.
Should you have any concerns, please contact your account manager. For information relating to Colt Data Centre Services, please visit us here.
