Each of our depots has between twelve and twenty security cameras. Until last year they recorded to a box in the comms room at each site, and when those boxes reached the end of their support we replaced them with a cloud video service. No hardware to maintain, footage available from anywhere, and a security manager who could review an incident at any depot without driving to it. On paper it was a good decision, and I still think it was.

We rolled it out to twelve depots over a month. Within a week of each one going live, the depot started complaining that its handheld scanners were slow. A scan that normally confirmed in under a second was taking three or four. Label printing slowed down, and calls on the depot phones began to break up.

Most of those depots are on business broadband with a download speed of about eighty megabits and an upload of twenty. That had always been plenty, because almost everything a depot did pulled data down to it: screens, updates, label files, email.…