With so many office workers working remotely, full-time, or on a flex schedule, here are some best practices for optimizing your home network for remote work.
1. Quality Internet Bandwidth – To assess your internet needs to effectively work remotely, it’s important to know the difference between download speeds and upload speeds and how each impacts your remote work. Download speed impacts activities like opening a web page, launching an app, or opening a file. These have traditionally been our most common home/remote computing needs.
With upload speed, we traditionally think of activities like saving files or media to share sites and sending emails with attachments. Still, in today’s world of remote work, it’s also critical to the quality of your conferencing capabilities (e.g. Zoom, Teams, etc.).
Most broadband internet plans have sufficient download speeds to effectively work remotely. However, upload speeds can vary widely which can add frustration and inefficiency to the remote work experience. Cable companies frequently fall short with much lower, and slower, upload speeds. The majority of residential cable upload cable speeds are capped at 10Mb, a far cry from the 300+Mb download speeds you likely have. Further, depending on network traffic, your speed may be even slower which will impact your conferencing call quality. When choosing your internet provider and plan, you will get better performance when the upload and download speeds are the same. Remember, voice/VOIP, video meetings, video surveillance, and sending emails or files are all consuming upload bandwidth.
Both cable and broadband fiber such as Verizon’s or Frontier’s Fios product connections are shared network connections and are not guaranteed bandwidth. The performance of these connections will vary depending on the time of day and neighborhood usage. They all share the phrase – “up to” and that’s the caveat when talking about internet speeds. The speed is not guaranteed.
Packet Loss is also important to quality. Packet loss on your network will make your audio calls sound terrible with broken words and cut outs of the conversation. If you are experiencing this, google how to check for packet loss on your network and you can run some simple tests to determine if you are experiencing packet loss. Report packet loss to your internet provider. Sometimes, it’s a bad connection on the cables feeding your residence or maybe your internet router/modem needs to be replaced. This issue must be resolved before good-quality calls and meetings can occur.
2. Number of devices on the network. The total number of devices and users in the house will impact your available bandwidth, so depending on the total number, you may not have the bandwidth for everyone to do everything they want at the same time. If you login to your home network router, you may be surprised to see just how many devices are connected to your network and consuming bandwidth. Smart TV’s, Ring doorbells, Alexa devices, mobile phones, smart watches, tablets, gaming consoles, surveillance equipment, etc. are typically all connected to your wireless network and competing for bandwidth. If you’re a home office worker and you’re going to be on important calls, it’s probably not a good idea to have others in the household streaming movies, playing online video games or multiple people using video meeting platforms at the same time.
If you have multiple users or devices on your network, consider using your mobile phone as a hot spot for important meetings or calls, especially when other users in the house are competing for the same bandwidth. If you are going to use your mobile phone as a hotspot, I recommend turning your phone’s Wi-Fi connection off first and then turn your hotspot on. Many 4G and 5G connections, with a single user, will be better than a shared cable connection. In this case, try to keep it far away from your home router Wi-Fi connection to eliminate interference.
3. An Ethernet connection is preferred over wireless. If possible, connect your work computer using an ethernet cable rather than using wireless. If you’re directly connected to your home router instead of through a wireless connection, it will be a much stronger and more stable connection than wireless.
4. Internet Router – The number one VoIP problem on home networks is making sure that SIP ALG is disabled on your home router device. This sounds a bit technical, but this protocol is usually a setting that can be toggled on or off in your router. The default setting should be off. If you use the router provided by your cable/phone company, call their tech support and ask if they can optimize your router/connection for VoIP traffic. They should be able to assist. Many home routers already have easy to use traffic priority tools to automatically recognize voice traffic and prioritize this over other traffic. Search the internet for your home router’s model and how to optimize it for voice. There’s generally good information available on the web. If your home networking router does not support prioritizing traffic, it may be time to replace it with one that can.
Recommendation: To work remotely effectively and efficiently you should have a plan that provides at least 50Mb download and upload speeds of at least 10Mb dedicated to the remote office worker. Depending on other network devices and users in the home, as mentioned in item 2, this will increase the need for additional bandwidth. Second, If you have the ability to choose from a cable connection or a broadband fiber connection that has higher upload speeds, choose the broadband fiber connection.