15 December 2020

Zabrina Doerck, director of product marketing, global Enterprise, Infovista.

The phrase, “I’ll just turn my video off…” as an antidote to poor video conferencing experience is becoming a common refrain. The problem is quite acute within the millions of UK workers now working from kitchen tables around the country due to the pandemic. The reason for poor video performance is largely down to lack of available bandwidth. The average UK broadband speed is 64Mbps according to data from Ofcom, the UK communications regulator. However, this capacity is at odds with a growing consumption model where services like Netflix running 4K video can easily consume 8Mbps. The headline 64Mbps average figure also doesn’t account for rural areas where speeds are typically much lower. In shared, rented dwellings favoured by younger workers, having multiple people working from home can lead to times when bandwidth demand dramatically outstrips broadband capacity.

A big part of the problem is that home networking equipment that often includes a modem/router plus built in WI-FI access point supplied by ISPs tends to be the lowest cost option – and as such, has limited utility when it comes to managing bandwidth, quality of service (QoS) and prioritisation of traffic. Within a traditional business setting, with larger capacity leased lines along with more advanced networking equipment offering the ability to provision QoS; the issue is less acute – but not completely absent.

Upgrade path

Solving the issue is not always simple and differs depending on circumstances. For users renting their own properties, upgrading broadband capacity from DSL based technology to full-fibre, also called fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) provides a boost in overall bandwidth. Speeds can reach up to 1Gbps, but unfortunately according to recent data from Ofcom, only 14% of households are able to gain FTTP.
Upgrading to cable-based internet or fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) is a more viable option for around 60% of UK households and this can offer a boost in performance of up to 300Mbps. The biggest issue for homeworkers is within shared accommodation where multiple residents are sharing a single internet connection. In this case, it may be beneficial to add a second, private fixed on mobile internet connection which can be used solely by an individual renter – although a more expensive option, it delivers a non-shared broadband access.

SD-WAN options

ISPs are also recognising the issue and providing several solutions. Although the UK trails in this respect, some major telecommunications providers in Europe are beginning to offer a new service that uses Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) technology to give businesses the ability to optimise their workers’ home office network experience. These solutions enable IT to prioritise certain workflows traversing the corporate VPN, such as video and voice calls, while restricting “household” activities such as social media and gaming from consuming corporate resources, leading to better QoE for business applications protected by the VPN. Of course, home workers may still go about their daily internet activities, but it ensures that they aren’t consuming corporate network resources when they do so, degrading their business application experience in the meantime. These SD-WAN solutions for the home office use special software that the business can provision remotely onto the employees’ work computers, and it contains additional security and QoS controls to ensure that home workers can enjoy a ”near-corporate” application experience. The solution essentially turns the home office into an unequipped, software-defined site on the network.

For larger organisations that have many critical home workers who need a high degree of business resilience – think executives, customer care, or other high criticality workers - many are looking at SD-WAN to help ensure seamless connectivity regardless of household traffic, residential overbooking, potential outages, etc. In that scenario, SD-WAN can be used as a failover, switching over to wireless business backup in the event that degradation in link quality is detected. These business resilience solutions involve equipping the worker with a small-factor physical appliance equipped with mobile connectivity modem and in many cases wireless access point. The SD-WAN technology then selects the best path to use depending on the type of data traffic and how access priorities have been set by the business. Both methods have the benefit of being remotely managed by the corporate IT team and effectively invisible to the end user. In addition, with the remote PC and network connections under unified management by the IT team, tasks that are commonplace in the office are also much easier to manage. For example, backing up of files or the remote patching of software can be controlled dynamically – and automatically placed in hibernation while Zoom or Teams calls are taking place to conserve precious bandwidth.

Need to know

It looks likely that the shift towards home working brought about by Covid-19 will likely persist well into the future. IT departments are now looking at the longer-term impact of managing these remote sites from both a connectivity and security perspective. The first practical step for many organisations is to gain an insight into how WFH staff are coping. Are staff experiencing issues when using video conferencing and accessing critical applications? What type of internet access do they have? And asking line of business managers – what the impact of poor internet connectivity is having on their workflows? Gaining an understanding of the challenge can help unlock budget which is vital alongside innovative tools and services that can help improve the WFH experience.