By: Skyler Ditchfield, GeoLinks CEO
As businesses across the country establish and put in place procedures to ensure business continuity in the face of uncertainties surrounding the spread of coronavirus, including a surge in remote-optional work, limited connectivity looms large over the best-intentioned plans. While your place of business may have its network firing on all cylinders, the likelihood that all of your employees have a similar setup at home is low.
Take for instance the fact that on average, business internet speeds tend to be anywhere from two to five times faster than those of residential connections. Add in the probability that most home connections are sharing access with the rest of their neighborhood and have restricted upload speeds. In the unfortunate circumstances we’re witnessing today, many of those homes are going to have business professionals conducting high-volume work on a network that is not prepared for it. You can now start to sense the feelings of frustration cropping up in home offices across the nation.
The issues presented by the sudden surge in remote work don’t stop at intermittent or inconsistent speeds though. Logistical issues such as accessing desk phone lines and voicemail present real-world problems that are difficult to solve without the proper business solutions in place. When customers and clients are conditioned to reaching your employees one way, it can create delays and missed opportunity when those employees don’t have access to these preferred methods of communication.
With so many businesses choosing to offer remote-optional work, we’re also seeing a significant uptick in the amount of video conferencing taking the place of in-person meetings. With the aforementioned circuit overloads, expect many of these video meetings to be interrupted due to sub-enterprise quality bandwidth.
All of this is not to say that solutions do not exist. Fixed wireless internet alone eliminates much of the uncertainty presented by these issues. With a dedicated signal provided to a single location, concerns of reduced speed, network downtime and service interruption are completely dissipated. With a hosted voice solution, employees have the same access to their desk lines of communications that they would have in the office. An SD-WAN solution provides your network with two traffic routes, allowing for optimized and seamless delivery of unlimited data, including video conferencing.
Even in the face of the existential threat that our world is facing, business owners cannot afford to halt their operations. It is often in times of great change and upheaval that we learn what is necessary to survive. In the case of protecting the health of your business, it might just be time to put solutions in place that create certainty in uncertain times.
