Networking from Home – Bigleaf Networks

Definitive guide to optimizing home internet for businesses with teleworkers

Bigleaf Networks — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 03:52:00 +0000

With so many people working from home, network constraints cause critical productivity issues. How can you improve the situation?

PDF Title

Download

Residential networks were never made to handle the volume of data required for employees to do business from home. Problems like choppy video meetings, poor VoIP call quality, and slow-running SaaS applications impact the ability to get work done effectively, or even done at all. Organizations that understand these constraints can take action to increase productivity and decrease downtime for employees working from home.

Read this definitive guide to learn:

Ways to gain visibility into network issues impacting remote workers
Techniques to optimize home networks for remote workers
How modern SD-WAN technology can improve home network performance
How to evaluate SD-WAN providers

Upload vs download speed and why it matters in your home office

Amy Chan — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 04:12:02 +0000

If you’ve experienced choppy Zoom or Teams calls in your home office, you’re not alone. According to a recent report by Waveform, an estimated 13.2 million of those who work from home are experiencing Internet connectivity issues daily.

You may be asking, “But I have a 100 Mbps connection. Isn’t that enough to run Zoom reliably?” Well, that question may not be as straightforward as you think.

If you have a cable or DSL internet line to your house, you probably have less upload speed than download speed. You may have bought a connection with 100 megabits per second (Mbps) of download capacity but only 15-20 Mbps of upload capacity. That means you could have plenty of download speed, but not nearly enough upload speed to handle all of the traffic in your home.

This graph shows a 100/15 Mbps internet circuit in a home office setting. Upload traffic is exceeding capacity several times each day.

Unfortunately, ISPs don’t always do the best job explaining the difference between your upload and download speeds, leading some to believe that they have a lot more internet capacity than they do. So, in this post, we’re going to dig into the realities of upload speed vs. download speed, how to determine what your upload and download speeds really are, and what you can do to keep limited upload capacity from ruining your calls.

What is internet speed?

Internet connections are usually referred to by their “speed,” or how much data your internet connection can transfer per second. Speed is measured in megabits per second (Mbps.)

When you signed up for the internet connection at your home or business, you probably signed up for a specific speed package like 100 Mbps. So, that means that your connection can send up to 100 megabits of data each second, right? Well, kind of.

Download speed vs. upload speed

Data goes in two directions — download and upload. Many internet connections have a lot more download speed than upload speed like the example speed package we mentioned above with 100 Mbps of download speed and 15-20 Mbps of upload speed.

A typical home cable internet connection with very different download and upload speeds (100/15 Mbps)

Your download speed refers to how long it takes to download data from a server. Streaming movies, downloading files, or reading emails are all activities that rely (almost) entirely on downloading data.

Upload speed is the same concept, but for data that you’re sending to a server. Uploading a file to a website, sending email, and posting a photo to Facebook all involve uploading data.

If you’re on a video conference, using a SaaS application, or playing an online game, you’re relying on both download AND upload speeds. These kinds of applications need to be able to both receive and send data in real time to avoid choppiness or lagging. That means a maximum upload speed of only 10-15 Mbps could be very problematic, especially if you have a Zoom call, a FaceTime call, and a file upload all happening at the same time.

How can I determine my real upload and download speeds? Fortunately, there are several free tools that can show you in a few seconds what your home internet speeds are. For example, speedtest.net is a tool that runs in your web browser. With one click, you’ll get a simple readout showing your upload and download speeds in Mbps.

An example of a speedtest.net report

These browser-based tests do have limitations, however. First, the test relies on flooding your connection to see how much traffic can go through. This can impact other traffic and limits it to a point-in-time measurement. Also, because the test is run from your browser, the results can be impacted by your WiFi performance. To get a better idea of your true speed, it’s a good idea to run the test in multiple places in your home to get a better reading.

Ultimately, the most reliable speed test can be done from an edge solution like Bigleaf that can connect in both directions to and from a dedicated backbone network.

What can I do to prevent upload restrictions from impacting my calls?

If you have determined that your upload speed is the cause of your poor video conference or call performance, you have a few options.

The quickest solution is to simply reduce the amount of upload traffic on your network. This may solve the problem in the short term, but may not be sustainable if you have multiple people in the home who need to be on calls, joining online classes, or using SaaS apps at the same time.

You can also upgrade your internet connection, giving you more upload speed. This is a straightforward solution. However, it will only solve the problem as long as your upload traffic stays below the new speed threshold. Anyone who works on highways will tell you that, if you add another lane to the road, the usage will eventually increase to meet the capacity.

Bigleaf Home Office can automatically identify and prioritize business traffic on your home network, making better use of limited upload speed

If you rely on communications tools like Zoom and MS Teams throughout the day, we recommend using a tool that can prioritize that traffic. These tools, like Bigleaf Home Office, can identify business and communications traffic and ensure that it’s first-in-first-out. So, if you do hit your upload speed limit, file downloads may be slowed but your calls and video conferences will run smoothly in both directions.

How are home internet and business internet different?

Amy Chan — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 18:15:21 +0000

Even before COVID-19 sent people home to work, the trend was clear: an increasing number of workers were using home internet connections for business. Over the last five years, the number of remote workers has grown 44%. There is no sign that the trend will slow. With COVID-19 restrictions affecting many businesses, there has been a huge surge in remote workers. Home internet connections that were once nearly abandoned from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm are now flooded with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Bluejeans, Office365, email, and VOIP traffic.

This increase in the amount of traffic on residential internet circuits is showcasing problems caused by oversubscription and network congestion. This has suddenly highlighted a topic that most people never really had to think about before now: a home internet connection is different from your connection at the office. Why is this, and how is it affecting the user’s internet experience?

You aren’t commuting, but your data is

Remote workers’ new commute distance might be a 20-foot hallway to the spare bedroom, but once they open their laptops and log in, their data has to travel a more complicated route. Due to geography, logistics, and economics, most residential areas are connected to the internet differently than business areas.

With a residential connection, data is being routed down residential streets and across neighborhoods. Residential areas are typically located far from internet backbones, which means there’s a lot more cable to cover with far less regular maintenance and upgrades.

All the devices and junctions that stand between an individual home and the ISP’s connection to the internet backbone are more points where things can go wrong. Whether copper, broadband, or fiber optic, more cable and connections degrade the signal in ways that can delay and scramble traffic. For the home user’s internet traffic, that translates to more potholes, red lights, and mysterious traffic jams on the Information highway.

Businesses typically install more robust fiber connections and more expensive services like frame relay, MPLS, and metro ethernet. Plus, businesses tend to be closer to ISP network points of presence, which means there are fewer connections and cable to pass through. In addition, ISPs provide service level agreements (SLAs) for businesses, promising uptime, speed, and quality of service. A business connection doesn’t involve as many changes in media, shared resources, or weather-beaten equipment.

Another major difference between residential and business internet connections is the ratio of downstream bandwidth to upstream bandwidth. Business connections tend to offer symmetrical or near-symmetrical service with the same speed for download and upload. Residential connections, on the other hand, are typically asymmetrical, favoring high download speeds for streaming video, games, media consumption, and other download-heavy usage patterns. Luckily, most business users at home will not experience problems with asymmetrical connections unless they are regularly uploading large files or otherwise pushing out a lot of data.

Residential oversubscription

Everybody loves it when their commute is free of congestion, but most would agree that it would not make any sense to build a freeway to every driveway. We build smaller, residential streets where the traffic demand is not that high. These feed into freeways that have much higher capacity. ISPs provide access to the internet for all their subscribers in much the same way.

When a customer signs up for a 100 Mbps ISP modem service, they are not buying a dedicated 100 Mbps pathway all the way from their home to the ISP’s network. Instead, ISPs oversubscribe residential networks, using historic data to understand what the average usage is across their subscribers. Since residential customers can rarely afford their own dedicated business lines, ISPs work to reduce residential internet costs by supporting only the usage they expect to see.

When there isn’t a sudden surge of people working from home all day, oversubscription is a cost-effective plan that provides more than sufficient internet bandwidth for all of their residential customers.

Oversubscription contributes to many bandwidth problems that business users will face on residential internet connections. At peak usage times, oversubscribed circuits hit maximum bandwidth and the end users will quickly notice. When the shared residential network is maxing out because of oversubscribed bandwidth promises, that will manifest for the end user as latency, jitter, lag, and poor connection times.

The long and the short of residential internet woes

Residential internet connections – whether cable, DSL, or even fiber – are in reality shared connections that are typically further away from central ISP internet hubs. Business connections, on the other hand, tend to be dedicated connections that are closer to central ISP hubs. The shared, distant connections lead to lower reliability, unpredictable speed, and greater number of glitches for residential internet service.

With automatic QoS, high reliability peering, and informative monitoring, learn how Bigleaf Home Office optimizes home internet for business.

Prioritizing business traffic over Netflix in the home office

Amy Chan — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 14:30:26 +0000

Many of us are currently working out of home offices alongside our family members or roommates who are doing the same. In addition to sharing more meals and living space, we’re also sharing more of our home Internet connection during more hours of the day.

Over a week’s time, this household’s Internet traffic peaked at ~95 Mbps, while averaging about 10-20 Mbps.

This can mean that one or two people are in and out of video conferences and using collaborative tools like Microsoft Teams all day, while someone else is using Google Classroom for school or streaming Netflix or Disney+. All of these uses rely on the home’s internet connection, which is commonly unreliable at best.

An estimated 13.2M people working from home due to Coronavirus are experiencing daily Internet connectivity issues.

Waveform, April 2020 Report: Millions of Americans are Working from Home with Unreliable Cell Signal and Internet

In a standard home network, the traffic from all of these sources is treated equally. So, Sally’s twelfth viewing of “Frozen 2” is getting the same priority as Mom’s Zoom call, meaning that Mom could experience garbled audio or choppy video that keeps interrupting her important meeting, or worse yet, dropping it altogether.

Here we see the same traffic data displayed in the graph above but categorized by QoS class. The majority of the traffic is bulk data (general web, Netflix, YouTube, etc.), whereas only a small portion is higher priority traffic (VoIP, Zoom, Slack, Office 365).

In an enterprise office environment, traditional networking technologies can sometimes be implemented and managed by a team of network engineers, using policies to prioritize traffic related to VoIP, video calls and business applications over less important traffic.

In a home office environment, this policy-based approach becomes exponentially more challenging due to the huge variability and lack of visibility for the IT team with each employee’s residential ISP connections, usage patterns, and home networking equipment.

The story changes when IT can implement and scale automated QoS across all of your teams’ home office networks. When you can take advantage of intelligent software instead of having to manually build policies to automatically identify and prioritize traffic for your business communications and applications—supporting your remote workers becomes much more feasible.

Bigleaf Home Office was able to automatically enforce a QoS policy where high-priority packets were protected almost 300k times over bulk data, ensuring that key business applications worked without interruption or degradation.

As seen in the chart above, solutions like Bigleaf Home Office use proprietary algorithms, instead of manual policies, to prioritize high-priority business application traffic over less important bulk data, while monitoring and adjusting traffic in real time—to the varying broadband capacity home ISPs deliver.

When this can be done for home office workers, their business tools can get the VIP treatment over streaming services, like Netflix, so they don’t drop or lag and team members who are working from home can stay productive and frustration-free.

Want to learn more about home office networking?

If you’re interested in how to prioritize your key business applications over Netflix, YouTube, or other internet applications, check out Bigleaf remote office and let us know if you have any questions.