If you’re wondering whether or not you need a dedicated account for your home office internet, the answer is a resounding ‘Yes’! Your home office is more important now than ever. You’re not using your home phone to make calls for work are you? So why are you using your family’s internet connection for work?
You may not be the only person “working from home” in your house anymore. Your children, often, are distance learning and/or playing video games which eat up a ton of your bandwidth from your home office internet. When different applications are fighting for bandwidth it has a detrimental impact on your conference calls, video chats, applications like Salesforce or Dynamics365, and other remotely accessed business applications.
Having a secondary account can add a measure of redundancy. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to choose between multiple carriers you can set up a fault tolerant network ecosystem for your home office internet. All it takes is a connection from the ILEC (phone company) and one from your MSO (cable company). You can use the connections independently or bond them with dual WAN router.
You’ll want to make sure your account is a business account. Not only is this good for accounting and tax purposes, with a business account you get a higher level of support, SLA, customer service and technical group to service your account. Pricing is higher than residential service but its worth it. Again, you’re not using your homophone to conduct business right?
Whose gonna pay for it? That’s a conversation that your company needs to have internally and it should. Many times companies leave it to their employees to supply their bandwidth because its easier from a logistics perspective. From a security perspective, I’d want to manage that at the employer end, providing a turn key work from home solution with compute device, phone, wireless access point, and security solution (mobile device management, firewall, network based security solution).
It’s really annoying when you’re on your VoIP phone on a work call and, on the other end, the caller is hearing echo and jitter because your kid is playing video games, live streaming and chatting on Playstation. It is simply unprofessional. If you and your spouse are working from home and your children are going to school online its just not enough to increase your bandwidth, you’re better off with a separate business account. It won’t stop you child from barging into your home office while you’re on a call but it will ensure your audio and video is always on (Hmmm… possibly not a good thing?).
Your systems need to be up to date and provide your clients with an experience that is up to par with what we come to expect today. With more and more employees working from home its imperative that companies increase their bandwidth at their core and renegotiate rates on burstable circuits with higher usage in recent months. Furthermore, if you’re going to be on TV, recorded, or livestreamed you’ll want to make sure you’re really nailed up. If you can’t get a second circuit at least prioritize your traffic.
If you’re an employee, especially an executive, you want to talk to your team about implementing a strategy to provide employees with an internet circuit for their home offices. It will provide additional security and reliability with an immeasurable value. If you’re on the IT side of things and you know it will be a hard sell to the folks looking at the bottom line, especially since you have to increase your z-side’s bandwidth, but it has to be done. In many cases, its as simple as adding a MiFi card but those cell towers have to connect back to the terrestrial network eventually to access those services. Get your folks an business internet account with a static IP or reimburse them so the company’s productivity isn’t fighting employee’s kids for bandwidth. You’ll lose every time.