It’s no secret that remote working has taken on a life of its own around the World - and rapidly.

The demands of 2020 required businesses to expand workforce flexibility broadly and many of them have continued to allow their staff the flexibility to work from home.

For many, this initially came across as a great opportunity: commutes became unnecessary, schedules become more flexible, mornings were not so rushed — the list is wide and varied.

With those perks come the inevitable challenges and frustrations associated with networking and remotely accessing documents and files from home. New challenges may arise around the quality of your employee’s internet connections which can affect their productivity, and ultimately, your bottom line.

Small business owners have many questions and frustrations about how to adapt. Here are a few of our tips on what the issue could be.

Most of Australia is connected via NBN (the National Broadband Network), and what most don't realise is that they have an asynchronous internet connection. That means that the upload speed of their internet connection is different to their download speeds. So typically, the download speed of your NBN connection is double that of the upload. 

So let's say you can download at 50 megabits per second, and upload at 25. That's typical in Australia. So while you're in the office and bringing things down from the internet going about your work, you're doing so at this speed.

To get a reliable stream of information the connection at home has got to navigate a path through the internet competing with everything else on that’s online. We don't know the quality of this home internet connection. Perhaps your employee’s connection is bad or they've got their hourly NBN because it was cheap. 

There are a number of peak times when a lot of other people get online. Your staff  might find that their internet begins dropping out at three o'clock in the afternoon when all the kids are home from school, or at nine o'clock in the morning, or in the middle of the day. 

Other things to consider are that it only takes one person to mess up your speeds if they’ve clicked on a massive download. This can use all of your bandwidth and starve everyone else.

So you can be working along quite happily and then suddenly get disconnected or become very slow. This could be a result of the fact that working remotely hasn't been factored into the design of your office network.

Remember that a person who knows how to remove viruses from your PC or reset your password will not necessarily understand internetworking traffic, quality of service etc. It’s best to engage a proper IT professional.

We can work out what applications you require access to, what traffic management is in place, and come up with a definitive answer. Don’t just throw money at the problem and hope it goes away. If you’re struggling you should hire a professional service like what we have here at Identity Computing. We can look at your network, understand what's wrong, and design a custom solution that’s right for your business.