Home Office Networks – Bigleaf Networks

Randi Robison and her experience with Bigleaf: No more compromises

Bigleaf Networks — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 03:08:00 +0000

When Randi Robison, Director of Partner Development – UT, ID for Telarus, started working from home full time, she struggled to work effectively because her internet connection didn’t provide the performance she needed. Her video calls dropped or were so choppy that she had to make decisions like turning off her video or calling in with her cell phone, just so she could participate in those calls. Then she brought in Bigleaf and all that changed. Hear her story.

Enabling network performance in the home office

Bigleaf Networks — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 02:57:00 +0000

Employees working from home (WFH) present unique challenges for businesses today, with multiple users and apps vying for network bandwidth and priority. Home internet issues can hurt employee efficiency due to slow SaaS reponsiveness, frozen video conferences, or choppy audio. Issues like these are often difficult for IT to troubleshoot and fix remotely. Watch this webinar to learn how our easy-to-deploy home office solution solves common issues for employees working from home.

Fixing choppy video and voice calls

Bigleaf Networks — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 02:49:00 +0000

We’ve been fielding lots of questions from Bigleaf partners and customers looking to get applications like Zoom and MS Teams to work reliably over residential internet. So we asked Bigleaf’s Founder, Joel Mulkey, to join us for a 30-minute chat/Q&A to discuss the most common issues and answer your questions.

Topics include:

Common causes of choppy audio/video
Diagnosing internet vs WiFi issues
Identifying and prioritizing call traffic
Available tools and technologies for home office networking

Prioritizing business applications in the home network

Bigleaf Networks — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 02:47:00 +0000

We’ve been fielding lots of questions from Bigleaf partners and customers looking to get applications like Zoom and MS Teams to work reliably over a home network. So we asked Bigleaf’s Founder & CEO, Joel Mulkey, to join us for a 30-minute chat/Q&A to discuss the most common issues and answer your questions.

Topics include:

How internet in the home differs from internet in the office
The impact of residential internet on business applications
How to diagnose issues with apps like Zoom and Teams
Available solutions and tools

Prioritizing business apps in the home network

Bigleaf Networks — Sat, 12 Sep 2020 03:21:00 +0000

Feeling the pain of the new norm of working from home? Businesses and remote workers alike are experiencing stress from using home internet connections for business applications.

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Problems like choppy video meetings, poor VoIP call quality, and slow running applications impact the ability to get work done effectively or even done at all. Optimizing the performance of residential internet can alleviate these issues to help keep business moving forward

View this eBook to learn:

How to improve network performance for business applications
Ways to diagnose and evaluate QoS (Quality of Service) challenges in your home offices
How modern approaches to prioritizing business traffic can help

Making home internet work for business applications

Bigleaf Networks — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 23:47:00 +0000

85 Million people are now working from home. You have teams working from home and it’s up to you to keep them connected and productive.

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So, you set them up with tools to facilitate remote working, but all of these can come to a screeching halt when your team has to rely on their home internet connection, which is unreliable at best.

What should they do? Call their internet service provider (ISP), expense new modems, or increase their bandwidth speed? When you understand the differences between home and business internet connections, it becomes much easier to troubleshoot any issues your remote workers are having.

View this eBook to learn:

The differences between home and business internet connections
Network causes for application trouble
Diagnosing and resolving network problems

Four keys to understanding and optimizing home networks

Amy Chan — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 16:30:29 +0000

When approximately 85 million people were sent home to work, most of us didn’t know how long it would last or what life would look like “after” the COVID-19 pandemic. Time has passed, and there is still no clear vision of what in-office life will look like in the coming months or years. It’s clear that there’s no going back to the old model.

In fact, nearly 43% of full-time American employees say they want to continue working remotely more often even after the economy has reopened, according to a national survey by getAbstract. Even as early as April 2020, 22% of CFOs surveyed by Gartner had already cut their real estate expenses or were planning to do so, and 32% had cut or were planning to cut on-premise technology spending.

All of this leads to the likelihood that more people will be working from home in some form or another for the foreseeable future, and that organizations can’t just wait it out until things get back to “normal.” Rather, they need to address and plan for this new reality.

From an IT and networking perspective, this means you will likely be asked to support your staff’s connectivity and application access in environments you did not set up, where you have little or no visibility or control.

Over the last few months, we’ve discussed home networking, residential internet connections, and other aspects of working from home that IT teams should consider. Here are four key things to know about home networks:

1. Home internet and business internet are different

Home and business internet and the networks they run on are set up differently, so how they perform is also different. This has become more apparent with so many people working from home and using these systems that weren’t built for that. Learn more about how home internet and business internet are different.

2. You can diagnose home network issues

Internet outages are a problem; however, there are more things that can happen on an internet connection that can cause degraded performance in your VoIP calls, video conferences, and other internet-based business tools that are just as frustrating as outages. Learn how to diagnose your teams’ home office internet problems and solve them.

3. More bandwidth may not solve your home internet problem

Internet providers sell speed packages and so many of us are accustomed to thinking that’s what makes or breaks a great connection. However, internet connections have issues regardless of the size or speed of the connection. Read more on why simply getting a faster speed package may not help your home network perform they way you expect.

4. Use QoS to improve the WFH experience

Quality of service (QoS) can be used to prioritize important business applications over other streaming services typically running at home (like Netflix, Xbox Live)—keeping your remote workers productive and focused. Check if QoS will help with home internet issues your remote workers are experiencing, then learn more about Bigleaf Dynamic QoS.

Create your own high-performance cloud network in your home offices with Bigleaf

Learn more about how Bigleaf Home Office will help your teams working from home stay focused and productive with reliable and performant internet and home networks.

More bandwidth may not solve your home internet problem

Amy Chan — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 15:00:19 +0000

Here’s why

Internet access at your team members’ homes is different from what you use at the office. When many of us stopped commuting, our data had to start making a difficult commute instead. We once headed into the office where our data had an easy route to the ISP network point of presence (PoP), but now the data from home offices makes the long journey, packet by packet, via the network version of country roads and residential streets.

Covering more ground means traveling through a lot of neighborhood cable that typically receives far less regular maintenance and upgrades than the infrastructure that supports businesses. It doesn’t matter if you’re using copper, broadband, or fiber. Signals can degrade as they make their way through all the devices and junctions between the home and the ISP’s connection to the internet backbone. You end up responding to calls from frustrated home workers about choppy Zoom conferences, dropped Skype calls, and frozen Dropbox uploads.

More of us are working from home, and it looks like the trend will be for a lot of people to transition permanently to remote work. Residential internet is frustrating and making our jobs harder. What can we do to fix it?

More bandwidth sure seems like it would help

It might not

First, ISPs provide their business clients with more robust fiber connections and trusted digital protocols like frame relay, MPLS, and metro ethernet. Their service level agreements (SLAs) assure businesses of uptime, speed, and quality of service. This isn’t something ISPs can just spin up in homes overnight for tens of millions of telecommuters.

With a 100 Mbps residential internet package, people aren’t getting a dedicated 100 Mbps pathway all the way through their ISP’s network for every minute of the day. They’re sharing the pipe with their neighbors who are also all working from home, while their kids watch Disney Plus. ISPs oversubscribe their network, supporting usage based on historic data so they don’t over-purchase their own connection to the internet. This is cost-effective in a normal environment, but not when every house on the street now has two home offices, a distance learning classroom, and an entertainment theater. Even if bandwidth is added, the oversubscription issue remains, as does all the typical problems with the network between home and the ISP — meaning remote workers will still experience lag, jitter, and downtime.

And don’t forget that data goes in two directions. Your home internet probably has much less upload speed than download speed, usually something like 15-20 Mbps upload versus 100 Mbps download. This makes sense, because until now, the typical home subscriber was much more concerned about Netflix in 4K which requires far greater download versus upload capacity than a Microsoft Teams videoconference, which needs both.

What if we upgraded to a symmetrical 100/100Mbps fiber line? Fiber is not the silver bullet one might think it is. Even businesses using fiber still typically experience over an hour of downtime each month: fifty minutes where packet loss, jitter and latency make the line unusable, and an additional nine hours of degraded performance.

Throwing more money and bandwidth at the problem is no guarantee. If you don’t first determine for sure if traffic performance between your home and the ISP is the root cause, you could be buying a solution that won’t work.

You can do a quick test of the connection to determine where the problem lies. Load up a business application like Zoom or MS Teams and turn off all the other internet devices in the house. If this eliminates the performance problems with the business app, see if there is LAN QoS available on the router. That may solve the problem. If not, then you may have to upgrade to a larger service.

Related: What is QoS and how do we know if it will help us work from home?

Most home internet provides plenty of bandwidth

On a 12Mbps residential internet connection, regular use often fails to saturate available bandwidth.

If you have a typical home broadband connection and it is healthy, you actually shouldn’t need to reduce the family to shadow puppets and whittling during work hours to preserve bandwidth.

If your business applications can’t function properly regardless of who else is on the network, the ISP is making the best effort to get your packets there on time, but it is falling short.

The problem could be issues of jitter, lag, and delay on the ISP’s network. A larger pipe will have the same problems, just cost more. The network beyond your reach is sub-optimal and the new demands of working from home are revealing its weaknesses.

Bigleaf Home Office

Bigleaf’s SD-WAN technology helps organizations address these problems and provide their employees with reliable internet access and application performance in their home offices, even with residential connections.

Bigleaf Home Office auto-detects application needs and adapts in real-time to internet performance and connectivity of home offices. Unlike traditional policy-based SD-WAN solutions, Bigleaf provides the uptime and performance needed, through automated and dynamic QoS, without the complexity and risk of manual configuration.

Bigleaf Home Office: QoS prioritization in action

Bigleaf Networks — Fri, 29 May 2020 00:19:00 +0000

See how Bigleaf Home Office prioritizes your key business application traffic over common types of household Internet traffic, such as streaming video, so you can stay focused and productive as you work from home.

What is QoS and how do we know if it will help us work from home?

Amy Chan — Fri, 22 May 2020 16:07:44 +0000

Now that the kids and adults are home across our neighborhoods, all working, schooling, playing, or simply looking for ways to entertain ourselves, we’re all on the internet all the time. This taxes our residential internet connections in unprecedented ways. While all applications that use the internet are impacted by connection quality and bandwidth issues, those with real-time features and requirements will feel it the most. File sharing and downloading can run quietly in the background, but video conferencing and VoIP will feel the effects of internet issues right away.

Quality of Service (QoS) tries to mitigate this problem and provide the best possible network service to applications deemed most important. QoS reduces the effects of packet loss, latency, and jitter on the network and allocates the bandwidth used by different types of network traffic. The goal of QoS is to ensure that high-priority traffic gets a smooth, uninterrupted experience.

Here’s how QoS works: Think of your internet connection as a huge multi-lane freeway. QoS is the tool that sets aside carpool lanes and bus-only lanes so that when traffic gets heavy, high-priority uses still have lanes reserved for them.

Can QoS really help?

While traditional QoS solutions can help in many situations, they are only as good as the resources available to support them and the bandwidth and internet connection they have to work with. Additionally, traditional QoS can only allocate bandwidth to internet traffic that leaves the local network. Everything beyond the local router is outside its influence and control.

This is an important limitation to understand, because sometimes the network problem is on the LAN, and sometimes the problem resides between the home router and the ISP. Connection and throughput issues can also spring up between the ISP and its upstream providers. Unfortunately, that means there are a lot of places where things can go wrong!

There are a few different aspects and implementations of QoS. In enterprise network environments, QoS is often implemented with manual policies that identify the requirements of sensitive applications that are key to business operations and route that traffic through the business network architecture. In home environments, routers designed for residential use can have QoS options, but they are often automated to focus on gaming or streaming services.

To understand whether QoS can help with home internet issues, the first and easiest test is to load up an application you’d want prioritized, such as video conferencing, and turn off all of the other internet devices in the house. Turn off Disney Plus, switch phones to mobile data only, tell all of the other stuck-at-home adults to go for a socially-distanced walk, and take the tablets away from the kids. If this eliminates all of the performance problems with the business app, we’ll know that the app works fine when the connection is more available. QoS prioritization can probably help by making sure that business-critical applications receive a higher priority over that bulk data.

If that does not fix the problem, we need to look at other causes. Consider the quality of the WiFi connection to the device and WAN issues. Also consider connection issues beyond the home, as they can’t be solved by typical QoS and will need a more intelligent, adaptable QoS solution. Home office workers can use the ping tool to test for connection issues inside and outside the house.

Related: More bandwidth may not solve your home internet problem.

Finding the right QoS solution for a home office

QoS solutions have been around for a long time, but most of them are targeted at enterprise or large office networks. Residential routers and cable modems sometimes have rudimentary QoS options, such as a single “Turn on QoS” button on the admin console. These are better than nothing, and you should see if they resolve the problem.

Delivering intelligent, autonomous QoS and providing reliable, resilient internet connectivity to and from cloud services over any commodity broadband connection is one of the core focus points for Bigleaf Networks. In response to the need for reliable internet for business use, Bigleaf Dynamic QoS prioritizes important traffic and, through the Bigleaf Cloud Access Network, provides optimal connection to vital cloud services.

Bigleaf Networks now provides a Bigleaf Home Office solution to help organizations set up reliable internet access and application performance in their employees’ home offices. Bigleaf Home Office is easy to deploy, and a simple setup works seamlessly with existing ISP and broadband connections – both single and multiple circuits!

Click here to learn more about Bigleaf Home Office.

Making home internet work

Amy Chan — Tue, 12 May 2020 16:00:19 +0000

Making Home Internet Work

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.

Bringing the office home: Create healthy home networks with Bigleaf Home Office

Amy Chan — Wed, 06 May 2020 18:40:33 +0000

Sometimes a product happens when you least expect it. That’s what happened with Bigleaf Home Office, a service specifically geared for those of us who are now (or have been) working from home.

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.

Making home internet work for business applications

Amy Chan — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 14:59:30 +0000

We’ve been fielding lots of questions from Bigleaf partners and customers looking to get applications like Zoom and Microsoft Teams to work reliably over residential internet. So we asked Bigleaf’s Founder & CEO, Joel Mulkey, to join us for a 30-minute chat/Q&A to discuss the most common issues and answer your questions.

When we asked the audience, “Have you heard complaints about home internet performance from team members or clients?” we weren’t surprised to find that 84% answered “Yes.” That’s because there are legitimate differences between home and business internet that can cause issues for your business apps.

Watch the recording to get the full story on:

Home vs office internet
Challenges for business applications
Diagnosing issues with apps like Zoom
Available solutions and tools

If you’re having issues running your business applications over home internet, we may be able to help. Check out Bigleaf for the remote office and let us know if you have any questions.

Putting SD-WAN to work in the single-circuit home office

Amy Chan — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 15:57:08 +0000

Employees working at home find themselves relying on technology to do nearly every part of their job. VoIP phones, video conferences and SaaS apps dominate their day. SD-WAN can ensure that those calls, conferences and apps keep working throughout the day. But most homes only have a single internet connection. You may be asking: “Don’t SD-WAN platforms needed more than one internet connection to work?”

Yes, multiple internet connections are great for failover and load-balancing. But SD-WAN can solve some of the most common home networking challenges even on a single internet circuit, using QoS to prioritize business applications.

Let’s look at a real-world home office scenario involving a single internet connection. We’ll break down the common problems that cause dropped calls and lagging apps. And we’ll show how SD-WAN can keep calls and conferences running the way your employees expect them to.

In this case, we’ll use the home of an actual user outside of Boston who installed Bigleaf for the remote office, giving us visibility into their home network performance and application use. We can use that data to illustrate the challenge and the solution.

This employee is used to working from home, but he’s now sharing the house and the network with the rest of the family during the work day. While he’s joining video conferences and making calls using a VoIP phone, four other people are using the internet to stream movies and attend classes online.

To start, we’ll look at how much capacity his single internet connection provides using some of Bigleaf’s web d ashboard reports.

In the capacity graph below, you can see the overall capacity of this home internet connection. The line on top represents download capacity and the line below represents upload capacity.

Like a lot of homes, there’s a lot more capacity for download than upload — roughly 100 Mbps in the download direction and 15 Mbps in the upload direction.

Now let’s see how much of that capacity they’re using.

In the throughput graph below, we can see how much traffic is flowing in each direction throughout the day. As in the capacity graph, download traffic is represented on top in green and upload traffic below in blue.

The download throughput never exceeds the 100 Mbps capacity, topping out at around 75 Mbps. However, right after 12:00 noon, something caused a spike in upload traffic that maxed out the upload capacity. That means some traffic couldn’t go through immediately.

If any of that delayed traffic was part of a video conference or VoIP call, there would be an interruption. That’s what we need to avoid. So let’s take a look at the types of traffic involved using Bigleaf’s QoS categories.

In this throughput graph, we can see that Bigleaf has automatically identified the different types of traffic and separated them into QoS classes. Bigleaf uses those QoS classes to prioritize more performance-sensitive traffic, like VoIP calls, to avoid any disruptions.

It looks like there was a spike in bulk upload data, represented in red, taking up about 14 Mbps of the available 15 Mbps of upload capacity for roughly 10 minutes. This could have been a large PowerPoint deck or maybe one of the kids uploaded a video file to Instagram.

There was also a VoIP call going on during that time, depicted in green. We can barely see the data on the graph, but the inspector shows about 32 Kbps of VoIP data in the upload direction.

In this case, the bandwidth constraint likely wouldn’t impact the file upload much. The file would just take a little longer to upload. But VoIP calls can drop or lag with even a slight data interruption. The goal here is to ensure that the file upload is impacted and not the VoIP call.

That’s where Bigleaf’s intelligent SD-WAN technology stepped in…

Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS was able to identify the VoIP call and prioritize it over the bulk data traffic, ensuring that the call didn’t drop or lag. Our employee likely never knew that anything had happened, even when the file upload maxed out the circuit. Had his wife started a Zoom call during that time, Bigleaf would have prioritized that as well.

If there was a second circuit available, maybe DSL or 4G wireless, Bigleaf could have also transferred the VoIP call to the other circuit without interruption. That would be necessary if we were dealing with an outage. In this case, Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS was able to keep calls live and sounding good regardless of what else was happening on the home network.

Choosing the right SD-WAN for your employees’ home offices

If you’re considering a home office SD-WAN for your team, there are a lot of options. You’ll need to choose an SD-WAN that can handle the unique needs of the home office.

Make sure your home office SD-WAN offers the following:

Bi-directional QoS – Many firewalls and SD-WAN offerings can prioritize traffic in the upload direction. But VoIP calls, video conferences and many other interactive business apps require prioritization in both directions. The Bigleaf Cloud Access Network allows us to provide QoS in both directions for any application, video conferencing platform or VoIP provider.

Policy-free QoS – Many SD-WAN vendors allow you to build policies to prioritize certain kinds of traffic or traffic from certain sources. But your employees’ calls and video conferences could be taking place on dozens of different platforms each day. Your company may use Zoom, but that doesn’t mean that your client isn’t inviting you to a BlueJeans bridge. Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS uses machine intelligence instead of policies to automatically detect and prioritize any VoIP or video conference traffic, regardless of the vendor.

Month-to-month Contracts – Many SD-WAN vendors require a minimum contract length of 12-months or more for their Home Office tools. But your employees might need to work from home for a month, two months or a year. Bigleaf Home Office is available on month-to-month contracts, so you don’t have to pay for the solution longer than you need it.

Simple Install – Your employees will likely be setting up their SD-WAN router themselves. Bigleaf installs in a couple of minutes and requires no on-site networking expertise.

Getting started

If you’d like to see Bigleaf in action for yourself, it’s easy to get started today. You can also request a quote for larger orders. For all other questions, contact us through the website and we’ll have someone reach out to you.