As they call it now, “the new normal”, which includes working from the house with the entire family including the dogs has had it’s benefits and it’s challenges.
Personally, I don’t mind the barking dogs and the children coming in during calls. That’s been somewhat amusing and a nice reminder of one of the big reasons why we do all of this. However, what has become more of a nuisance is the choppy voice, loss of voice, video degradation and complete loss of internet altogether.
We were on a call with a vendor a couple weeks ago with four people from our team and two from his team and the moderator simply went away. It was a web meeting where we were interacting on a new ERP portal and right in the middle of it the moderator was lost. What transpired is we had to reschedule as we later learned he had lost connectivity at his home.
On another call, our team uses Voice over IP and we had a call internally and we were experiencing choppy voice with one of our team members that became impossible to understand. We can work to solve this for business users, and most of our internal users by deploying an SD-WAN device that we augment with a 4G connection load balanced for VoIP so the best path is chosen. This solves for 99% of our poor voice communication, however this user hadn’t implemented the solution as of yet.
This got us thinking about what is the new normal going forward and does that mean we are going to be working from home for months or is this something that will stay forever? Whatever the case may be, businesses have just added, in some cases, hundreds of new network nodes for their at-home users, and these nodes obviously are going to require security and optimization so the user can conduct their job efficiently.
Does this mean every user needs a SD-WAN device to provide for a primary and secondary connection with an SD-WAN device allowing for best path selection? Probably not. However, C-suite, VPs, Directors, Sales, etc….those folks that are on the phone constantly, likely utilizing zoom or some other video applications and are 100 percent reliant on the home network to do their job, they are likely candidates for a solution here.
I am curious if your team is experiencing issues, and if they are, let’s chat and figure out how we can work together to solve this. The truth is we already have a plan because this is what we have done for businesses for years, and it’s just a matter of making it cost-effective and a fit for your new remote users.
