How to Maximize Your Remote Work Experience

When working from home, several additional factors need to work perfectly for you to have a great remote experience.

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• Your home internet feed is a best-effort service. There are no guarantees in speed or uptime. The speed of your service is based on your subscribed rate and what your neighbors are doing online at the same time. Your home internet service needs to be at least 10Mbps/10Mbps. The bigger the service you are subscribed to, the bigger the slice of the available pie you get.
• Like your home internet service that is shared with your neighbors, your home network is shared with your family. The speed of your service is based on what your family is doing online at the same time. Streaming audio and video like movies, music or games create significant delays when working from home.
• Home wireless is not the wireless you are used to at the office. Devices plugged into a wire in your home work at 100Mbps/100Mbps or better. Home wireless often performs at 10Mbps/10Mbps. Maybe you are thinking, "Great, that matches my internet," but add up all the devices connected wirelessly right now and divide that by the speed of your internet: 10Mbps divided by 10 devices equals 1Mbps. Then add in what was noted in items 1 and 2, and the experience worsens.
• How you work plays a significant role in your experience. Opening Outlook, Word and Excel will take a second or so longer but can be left on the server/cloud and edited. When opening larger files like AutoCAD, Solidworks or Adobe Creative Suite, consider saving them to your local computer and then uploading them back to the server when you are done editing.
• Applications you access through your web browser will be fine, but all other business applications rely on the 1,000Mbps/1,000Mbps speed at the office and won’t work well opening what is essentially a 1Mbps/1Mbps connection. For those applications, you need to either remote into a computer or server at the office. Doing so sends only the screen changes and mouse and keyboard clicks over the internet, which allows the application to still work at the 1,000Mbps/1,000Mbps back at the office.
• Lastly, the internet speed at your office is being used by everyone in the office and those working remotely. Companies with 30 total computer users should have at least 100Mbps/100Mbps SLA-guaranteed internet.

At Thriveon, we provide a truly proactive IT service that aligns our clients to best practices and strategically guides their entire technology spend, eliminating issues before they start and allowing their business to do more with less.