Not so very long ago, we all commuted to and from our offices every day for work, there were cars and traffic and freeways involved. Of course, then 2020 happened and suddenly we all worked remotely and began just commuting down the hallway of our own home instead of down the freeway.  As we enter 2024, hybrid work environments have become more and more common. Many of us now commute down the freeway two or three days each week and down our own hallway the rest of the week. 

While hybrid work is great for things like work/life balance, it presents certain challenges when it comes to basic connectivity. After all, your home internet connection isn’t the same as your office internet connection, and with many of us taking meetings via Zoom or Teams or Slack all day, internet connectivity, stability, reliability, and redundancy have become more important than ever. 

SD-WAN: The Backbone of Modern Workplaces 

At the core of this hybrid work frontier is SD-WAN, or Software-Defined Wide Area Network, which has become the most flexible and efficient solution for modern businesses with distributed networks.  

By separating control functions from physical infrastructure and applying software-defined networking principles, SD-WAN offers increased visibility into network traffic, dynamic path selection for optimal performance, and improved reliability by intelligently rerouting traffic. In other words, SD-WAN makes for a more reliable, stable, and adaptable network as compared to traditional WAN. 

Bigleaf’s Approach to SD-WAN 

By elevating what SD-WAN can be, Bigleaf has become an ideal solution for the intricacies of hybrid work models. For example, Dynamic QoS (Quality of Service) allows you to identify and prioritize certain traffic. What this means is that when you’re working from home you can give the traffic for your Zoom call priority over the kids watching Netflix in the other room, meaning that if there’s a network issue then their TV show might buffer but your video conference will remain crystal clear.  

Another huge benefit Bigleaf provides is Same IP Failover. In other words, you can have one network entirely fail and Bigleaf will switch all traffic to your other network without changing your IP address, meaning no dropped video calls or needing to log back in cloud-based applications, you likely won’t even know a network failure took place. 

These features, and more, add not only to the reliability but also the security of your network, particularly for remote work. Bigleaf also peers directly with over 150 cloud, content, and carrier networks private, direct connections to cloud applications.  

The Future of Hybrid Work 

These past few years have taught us that it really is anyone’s guess what’s right around the next corner. One thing is for certain though: as with life, business will continue to find a way. And business will always require reliable network connectivity. Bigleaf was built to scale right along with your business. From single circuit to multiple circuit to our High Availability solution, Bigleaf can improve your network today and grow with you into tomorrow.  

Whether your business operates in-office, remotely, or hybrid, Bigleaf has an SD-WAN solution to improve and optimize your network connectivity. Learn more today.

This content was originally published as part of our Linkedin Newsletter, Bigleaf Bytes, in January 2024. Subscribe now on LinkedIn.

So, while we know that video and VoIP problems are often caused by poor internet connections, there are other culprits too. In this article, we will give some examples of quality problems so you can determine what the real culprit might be and how to resolve it.

When your equipment is to blame 

Sometimes, the main culprit in bad calls isn’t the internet connection at all: it’s the computer and its attached peripherals. When we are lucky, the problem is simply a configuration issue or a minor setting.  

Voice is too quiet or volume too low  

If the person on the other end of the conversation is reporting that they can’t hear the other side, frequently this is because the audio settings on the computer aren’t set correctly. The audio input needs to be turned up. 

Popping, crackling, or distorted voice 

If the opposite happens, and the audio is turned up too high, voices will come across to the listener with buzzing, popping, or cracking noise. Too much signal is being pushed through the computer and is distorting the audio. 

Fuzzy voices or lots of background noise 

Many computers and laptops come with low-quality microphones that just can’t do a good job picking up voices or differentiating between the speaker’s voice and background noise. In some cases, this isn’t the microphone’s fault but the nature of the environment – noisy surroundings are going to crowd into the call! 

Luckily, there are a lot of external computer microphones and headsets on the market that are still a huge step up from the built-in mics in most laptops. You can find very affordable USB and Bluetooth microphones easily that are a sufficient upgrade. Look for noise cancelling capabilities. Make sure the application gets configured to use the new microphone or headset. 

Blurry video or poor video color quality 

Just like many laptops and computers come with low-quality microphones, so it is with webcams. Poor quality webcams send low-resolution video, fuzzy video, or just bland and washed-out video. If there is a nicer webcam plugged into the computer, make sure it’s selected as the default video input device in the video conferencing software. 

Choppy voice, blocky video 

Video conferencing can be processor-intensive work, and if a computer is already overloaded, it might not be able to keep up with the demands for computing power. This manifests in a number of ways. Software can freeze up, voice can become choppy or non-responsive, and video can become blocky or just stop all together.  

Some of these symptoms look very similar to problems caused by internet issues. The operating system’s task manager or process manager can be used to determine if the computer is being over-burdened by too many running applications. Look for spikes in CPU and memory when the video call is in process. 

Diagnosing network problems 

Once you’ve ruled out issues with the computer and peripherals, it’s time to turn your suspicions to the internet connection. Video conferencing and VoIP can have some of the most stringent performance requirements of all Internet traffic. Different VoIP implementations respond in varying ways to the network issue, so performance may be poor and unstable. Here are some examples of what internet connection problems might look like. 

You can’t always spot your own problems 

Barring hardware problems, everybody sees their own video just fine. Since local video doesn’t have to travel over the internet and pass through extra processing, compression, and routing, each participant in a video conference sees their own video feed in the highest possible definition with as few problems as possible. 

While this allows everybody to make sure they don’t have spinach in their teeth or a stack of dirty dishes in the background, it also prevents a participant from noticing issues with their own internet connection. They need somebody on the other end to tell them if something is going wrong. 

The big freeze 

When video or audio freezes and the computer isn’t to blame, there has been a network interruption or outage. Maybe this is just because the home router or WiFi access point needs to be rebooted, but even more often, there is a connection interruption somewhere between the computer and the video conferencing service. 

Blocky video and reduced video resolution 

If the video gets blocky, or especially if it changes to a lower resolution and gets grainy, this means that somewhere on the internet, there are connection and bandwidth issues. These are frequently temporary or intermittent problems, as internet nodes and video conferencing software will already be working to repair them. This is one problem that can frequently seems to resolve itself in a few moments. 

Robot voice 

The same internet conditions that can cause reduced video resolution can also contribute to “robot voice”. You know it when you hear it. The person on the other end of the call will sound like they’re out of a bad 1980s music video, with long drawn-out noises and over-processed, electronic tones. 

Most VoIP and conferencing software will do its best to make up for reduced bandwidth and connection problems to keep the video and audio in sync, and those software corrections lead to the robot voice effect. 

Delay and stutter 

As streams of data travel across the Internet, sometimes data can arrive at its destination at unpredictable times and even in an unpredictable order, called packet jitter. It can take the computer a while to put packets back in order. Jitter shows up in voice and video as really bad delay or stutter. 

Internet protocols are designed to handle this sort of issue, so most of the time you won’t even notice occasional jitter. However, sometimes the delay gets so bad that conference participants start talking over each other. This is definitely indicative of an internet connection problem. 

Directional problems 

Since each participant in a video conference has a different internet connection, each can experience quality problems in completely different ways. This means that just because you are receiving blocky, laggy video, that doesn’t mean the person on the other end is experiencing any problems at all. Her download may be delivering you in smooth crisp HD but her upload is sending her image and audio through a poorly performing or too-small of a connection, creating a really disruptive experience for you. It’s important to let others know when you’re experiencing audio and video issues so that everybody can have the opportunity to improve their connection. 

What can you do about call quality problems in the home office? 

Depending on the issue you’re facing, the solution could be as simple as purchasing a new pair of headphones or having your at-home employee reboot their ISP modem. However, if the problems stem from the performance of their residential internet connection and home network you don’t control, Bigleaf Home Office can provide your employees with reliable internet access to ensure worry-free call quality from their home offices.

Learn more about improving call quality

Check out this recorded webinar “Fix bad video and VoIP calls for good” to learn how to solve common issues and enable a worry-free connection.

With the sudden, urgent shift to work from home that began in March and the current likelihood that many will continue to work remotely, IT and help desk staff are expanding into new territory. Instead of just on-premise-support, now your IT team is also supporting dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of home offices, each with its own quirks, unique configurations, and unknown hardware.

One of the challenges with supporting remote workers is that they still need to hold meetings, and with today’s amazing advances in internet telephony and video conferencing, using video chat is becoming the new norm. In addition to video conferencing, there are many other business applications vying for support and bandwidth, from file sharing to database access to remote desktops to VPNs. Residential internet connections were not built to simultaneously handle this type of traffic alongside gaming and streaming services all day, especially when aggregated across entire neighborhoods and even rural areas filled with at-home workers.

Supporting home office network connections

Home offices face a number of internet connection challenges. Due to the asymmetry of residential bandwidth, home office network connections tend to have low upstream throughput. Business applications are definitely competing with residential bulk data for their share of that coveted home internet connection.

The wide variety of network devices being used by at-home workers will make it challenging for the IT support staff to be familiar with every configuration and every option available. In this situation, you are reduced to guiding non-technical workers through ping tests over the phone and urging your coworkers to go thumbing through manuals in hopes of finding helpful support information. This is not an ideal situation and is bound to be frustrating for all parties involved.

A configuration option that may be available for remote workers in their home network is Quality of Service, or QoS. This will configure traffic shaping at the network device and can hopefully be used to give priority to specific types of traffic. However, it is important to remember that in residential routers and access points, the QoS settings will typically be limited. It may just be an on/off toggle switch.

Residential hardware is not typically good at identifying a variety of traffic types, which means that while it’s possible to turn QoS support on, it might not actually be addressing the problem. However, some do implement device-level prioritization by MAC or IP address. When available, this could be useful for favoring the work computer over the kid’s tablet.

If the router does have more detailed QoS configuration options, a certain level of technical know-how will likely be needed to make those policy changes. Whether the options are basic or more complex, it’s likely that each of your home workers is using a different model of router and different hardware to connect to the internet. This means IT would have to support an array of devices with different capabilities.

Advanced solutions for the home office

Since the QoS solutions in residential hardware are typically limited, the first solution to come to mind might be to use existing enterprise hardware and repurpose it for the home office. In order for a QoS solution to be able to prioritize business traffic over residential traffic, it needs to be able to do these three things:

1. Identify the source and type of network traffic.
2. Synchronize information across devices.
3. Be aware of the total amount of bandwidth available – in both directions.

Most traditional enterprise QoS solutions can handle the first two requirements just fine, but many don’t have the ability to be aware of throughput or network capacity. They are designed for the consistent business connection, not the shared, fluctuating residential connection. This limits the effectiveness of their traffic shaping capabilities for a residential service.

Fortunately, there are newer QoS technologies such as Bigleaf Network’s Dynamic QoS, which automatically identifies and and applies automated QoS policies to ensure business app traffic is prioritized over other household traffic. Bigleaf also monitors constantly shifting broadband capacity in real time to adjust traffic before key applications drop or lag.

Bigleaf is committed to helping organizations provide their employees with reliable communications, internet access, and application performance in their home offices. Bigleaf Home Office can keep the chaos and unpredictability of residential Internet connections from impacting business communications and applications.

With an easy plug-in, no manual-configuration installation users can do themselves, Bigleaf Home Office can be easily deployed across your team’s home offices. A Bigleaf edge router is sent directly to each home office, and the typical install simply requires it to be plugged in to the existing ISP modem and to a WiFi router without the need for specialized IT resources. The set up works seamlessly with existing ISP and broadband connections, supporting both single and multiple circuits.

Alongside QoS, Bigleaf Home Office offers software-defined networking (SD-WAN) with support for redundant network connections and outage detection outside the home network. Bigleaf utilizes its nationwide Cloud Access Network and gateway clusters to ensure a high-performance connection to the Cloud. You can also remotely view and manage the health of the home office network with the Bigleaf online dashboard, which will make troubleshooting infinitely faster.

Learn more about Bigleaf Home Office.

How to support connectivity for business applications when everyone works from home

The challenges of managing IT for our newly remote workforce cannot be overstated. As the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered our offices, the number of Americans working from home went from 15 million to an estimated 92 million. That means you have gone from supporting one, or maybe a handful of sites, to supporting all the business apps your users need on different devices connected in different ways to different ISPs.

As in-person meetings move to video conferencing apps and files are flying around inboxes and collaboration tools, your users are leveraging more digital apps than ever. They need fluid video and at-the-ready resources, while hooked up to a home internet service that you have no control over. As funny as it is to see the CEO’s video get stuck in an awkward pose during an all-hands call, these connectivity issues are disrupting the key apps that run your business. With the coronavirus pandemic keeping us all at home for the foreseeable future, it’s your role to lead your company to stable, reliable, working internet.

We’re wrangling terabytes on a system built for “Tiger King”

When trying to serve users at home, it’s useful to consider some fundamental differences in home and office internet contracts, infrastructure, and packages.

• Data has a harder path to travel to residences. ISP points of presence tend to be closer to offices than homes. This means that there’s more infrastructure between your home and the closest internet ‘hub,’ increasing the chance of something breaking or slowing down your data.
• Residential ISP contracts don’t have the service level agreements (SLA) that are usually a part of your business service. Your sales development rep Clara is now mission-critical from her home office, but does not have the power to enforce an SLA for service to her two-bedroom unit in the burbs.
• You generally don’t use all of your bandwidth at home and neither do your neighbors. ISPs build their business model on oversubscription: selling more bandwidth potential than they can actually provide because they know it is unlikely for all of it to be used – sometimes at 40 to 1. Now we are all working from home, and their calculations are way off. They become a bottleneck.

Their home network is a black box

At the office, you know your equipment. You probably installed and configured much of it yourself. Maybe you named some of your favorites. It’s OK, we see you. The point is, you are in control of your stack and you know how it works. Your users’ home LAN and the ISPs WAN may as well be a black box and you have no way to figure out what’s going on with it.

Your customers (a.k.a. team members working from home) have their own customers – the other family members who are using the network for learning and entertainment. The LAN can have all manner of devices and configs. How do you troubleshoot a connection you can’t see?

Give your traffic the right of way

The solution to internet connectivity problems is to prioritize the important business traffic above apps that are not business-critical. Sometimes, all it takes is a manual approach: Having your user identify the traffic hogs on their connection and curb their use – human or machine. This might be unpopular in the household, so for most users, you’ll need a more sophisticated solution. Configuring the user LAN’s Quality of Service (QoS) settings on their residential routers can help (if the router has a QoS capability), but only for problems that originate in the home. It won’t resolve issues between their ISP modem and the servers that host key business applications.

Bigleaf Home Office is a software-defined wide-area network, or SD-WAN, based on technology we have effectively delivered to support office environments. To optimize existing ISP service in the home office, Bigleaf Home Office automatically detects the needs of business applications and intelligently adapts traffic in real time. It supports single circuit connections that are typically found in homes and can also use two internet connections to load balance traffic and perform automatic failover.

Speed test results don’t tell you much

When users encounter a slowdown, their first port of call is frequently a web speed test like speedtest.net. When the results come back saying everything is peachy, they think their problem must have been a blip. We have found that some ISPs actively prioritize speed test traffic to reduce the number of angry customer calls. These popular tools can’t be relied upon to give you what you need to know to support them effectively.

With our technology, you get real-time and historical data and insights about what’s happening across your home office connections. So, when the call comes from a remote worker with internet or application issues, you’ll know what to do. Read about Bigleaf Home Office or request a demo if you want to learn more.

We had always wanted to develop a home office solution, but there were some challenges holding us back that would need to be solved before we could release it. When the sweeping stay-at-home mandates hit and led more than 92 million people in the U.S. to work-from-home, we knew we had to expedite our efforts to support them. We realized that these new remote workers would not only have to share their internet connection with their families and housemates, they would have to count on their residential ISP lines, which can often be unreliable. Amidst all the other distractions business workers might face at home, we wanted to help them stay productive with their work, without having to deal with problematic internet connections and compete for bandwidth with non-business applications.

Bigleaf Home Office prioritizes the traffic most critical to your online calls (VoIP/Video) and business applications over less critical things like file transfers or video streaming. The Home Office product, like our business offering, does this by segmenting the traffic into different classes and prioritizing them accordingly. This means that while someone is watching Netflix or transferring files, your Zoom call (or similar) remains uninterrupted and is given the performance it requires.

While a common belief is that SD-WAN solutions require a second circuit to work. Bigleaf Home Office also works effectively with a single circuit. Not only does it manage QoS prioritization in the home office LAN, its connection to our Cloud Access Network allows it to monitor the circuit outside the home network and adapt in real-time to varying broadband capacity–to make sure key applications don’t drop or lag. 

Based on Bigleaf technology, Bigleaf Home Office uses intelligent algorithms, instead of policies, to automatically identify and prioritize business app traffic. This, alongside a streamlined installation process allows everyone from highly technical to not-technical people to successfully bring the service online in their homes.

We initially rolled out Bigleaf Home Office in March of this year and focused our efforts to help those who most critically needed the service via our Essential Services program. We have since helped companies across the US bring the Home Office service online and ensured their business applications performed as reliably as needed. Now, with so many more of us working from home, the need and focus of having home offices operate with the same efficiency and performance as business offices is more necessary than ever. 

In addition to making Bigleaf Home Office more broadly available, we’re also announcing a new, larger service package of 1000Mbsp down/ 100Mbps up. Now, whether you are running a 80/10 Mbps DSL line from a rural ISP or a more robust fiber line, there is a service package to fit the needs of remote workers to make sure they do not get interrupted or lose productivity. 

This is all in thanks to those of you who have contacted us and provided us with your feedback to help shape what we made available. It is a part of our DNA to constantly engage and ascertain how well our product is fitting your needs and solving your problems. We value these interactions with the highest regards and it is through this feedback that we are able to become aware of new needs or missing components of our product line.

To get more details on Bigleaf Home Office or the new bandwidth package, please reach out to your Channel Sales Manager, or contact us at 1-888-244-3133. If you’re not a Bigleaf Customer yet and would like to learn more about how we can help ensure performant uptime across your home offices, request a demo today. 

To address these issues, people have been switching their home Internet plans to fiber because increasing their speed and capacity seemed like the logical thing to do. However, even with this type of upgrade, we’ve continued to hear about stuttering application performance and the message, “your Internet connection is unstable,” popping up on peoples’ screens. 

For example, one person we talked to was still experiencing problems even after he had upgraded to a symmetrical 100/100 Mbps fiber line. This didn’t make sense to him as he thought that such robust connection would big enough to handle video conferences for two people working from home, even with a child streaming 4K videos.

Well, that would be true if the fiber internet connection itself was always running 100% optimally. If that were true, then yes, the 100 Mbsp both ways should have no issue transferring that traffic back and forth, making all those applications run without interruption. But more than a year ago, we investigated the performance of fiber lines that our business office customers were using and discussed in our blog post, “Busting the fiber myth: It’s not the ‘silver bullet’ of internet connections.”  

What we found was that the average fiber connection has downtime, instability, and degraded performance several times per month. More specifically, based on the data of our business office customers, we found that fiber connections:

• Had over an hour of downtime per month on average 
• Were unusable for an additional 50+ minutes per month, where the circuit was live, but performance issues (packet loss, jitter, and latency) were so bad that performance-sensitive applications like VoIP wouldn’t run
• Experienced almost 9 hours of degraded performance each month 

This all totaled up to an average of more than 10 hours of downtime or degraded performance per month on fiber optic circuits.  

To combat all of this, for the 40% of our business customers who were using fiber last fall, Bigleaf performed an average of 222 QoS speed adjustments on fiber circuits in a single month. This means Bigleaf automatically detected and prioritized business application traffic for VoIP, UCaaS, CCaaS, and remote desktops in real time—protecting the traffic and ensuring uptime and application performance over the highly-variable fiber internet connections. 

As we’ve started to deploy Bigleaf in home offices, we’ve seen how this same unreliability affecting business-grade fiber lines also affects residential fiber lines—creating business application and performance issues for everyone who works from home.

Learn more about how Bigleaf for the remote office can help you proactively address this unreliability and create a more effective home office.

Want to learn more about Home Office networking?

Watch our on-demand webinar, “Making home internet work for your business applications” or follow us on LinkedIn to get more content and notifications of upcoming webinars.