The outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdowns have placed enormous strains on businesses, public services, communities and individuals. We’ve changed our ways of working and made adjustments to almost every aspect of our daily lives. We’ve become more reliant on global connectivity and realised its importance.
During a time when connectivity is integral to every area of our lives, we recognise how crucial it is that we maintain the quality of the services we provide to our customers. Our global network infrastructure sits at the heart of connectivity and is continuing to help people, businesses and things communicate with one another in these challenging times. As such, we’ve taken special measures to enable enterprises, people and things to stay connected across the world, through the lockdown period and beyond.
Business continuity and customer operations
We have taken measures to maintain the quality of the services we provide to our customers and the wellbeing of our employees. In alignment with respective national government recommendations, most of our locations have been placed in full homeworking, except for critical functions that will remain onsite at our global headquarters in Brussels.
We’ll continue to support our customers, and our commercial, technical, customer care and finance teams will remain available 24/7. Our regional teams can provide support tailored to the needs of each customer via local offices and points-of-presence.
Enabling people, things and enterprises to stay connected
BICS is closely monitoring international traffic and will continue to enable people, enterprises and things to stay connected during these difficult times. We are ready and able to support the requirements of increased capacity, and we have proactively taken measures to help our customers ease congestion on their national networks.
Cloud communications have become integral to all kinds of businesses throughout the world. We’re enabling our customers to deal with the increased demand for cloud communications services at present while ensuring optimum quality of service for their end-users. Also, we’ve installed the necessary equipment to support service providers’ increased requirements for connectivity to the cloud. Our virtual numbers have been vital for critical communications and emergency services during the peak of the crisis and continue to be used by organisations, enterprises and authorities as the situation evolves.
The global travel bans have resulted in a considerable impact in roaming for mobile operators. BICS is working with our operator customers to ensure continuity of roaming connectivity for essential activities while preparing to meet the growing demand for IoT connectivity from solution providers and enterprises, and generate new revenue streams. This includes advancing NB-IoT and LTE-M roll-out and accelerating relationships between mobile operators and leading device manufacturers. Furthermore, our advanced analytics solutions are continuing to help mobile operators optimise roaming and IoT revenues.