With the increase in working from home this year, we have been asked this question quite a number of times.  So we thought we should address this as a blog article to help our clients understand all the factors which affect your remote connection when working from home and may limit the speed of your connection.

If we start with a explanation of what a remote connection is.  A remote connection is where the user is able to access IT services, software applications and data from a different location to your office where said services are located.  They do this through an internet connection.  Now while your remote connection is done through your home internet connection, this does not mean that all your speed issues with your remote connection may be to do with your home internet speed.  There are other factors associated with your home network that can impact your remote connection.  Let’s explore them now!

We mentioned internet speed so we will start with the issues this can cause.  Most often our clients can be frustrated with their remote connection being slow when they know they get a reasonable internet speed, however, this will be the download speed.  What you also need to take into consideration is your upload speed which will generally be a lot slower than your download speed and this will affect the speed of your remote connection to your work PC.  It would depend on your type of broadband connection as to whether we would suggest an upgrade here would greatly benefit your working from home setup.

With our current situation in society, the majority of our colleagues and employees may well be working from home all at similar times.  This means you have to share the connection into the office network with all your colleagues, which again can limit the speed which you can get from your remote connection.  If we determine this to be an issue, it may be as simple as creating a more staggered work pattern for accessing your network to allow everyone to work at the maximum speed to be gain from remote working when they need to access the network.  There may be some network infrastructure changes we can recommend to help this aspect as well, but simply creating a schedule to reduce the amount of users accessing your network at any one time may help if this is possible with your core business activities.

The final factor that we need to consider is your home network.  Is there anyone else working from home?  Do you notice the speed issues when the children are home and playing games online or streaming movies or music?  As we move to more of a digital experience in our personal life as well, we rely more and more on our internet to provide us with access to our entertainment.  This means we have an increasing number of devices accessing the internet through our home networks and this can affect the speed of your remote connection, as it is limited by the capacity of your home network.  So the same idea of a schedule may be required to limit the amount of devices drawing from your internet resource when you need to work.  It may also be worth considering the quality and age of your home router or if you are using a wireless or wired connection to the internet.  All of these can also be factors in the speed of your remote connection.

Hopefully this has helped to explain why it is often not an easy answer or an easy solution to improve the speed of your remote connection while working from home.  If you suspect there are deeper issues or you’d like to discuss any of the points raised in this blog in relation to your own connection please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the team here at MJD.  Let’s make IT work for YOU!