Upgraded Internet and WiFi !!!

[Brian Elfert]

Your IT department must have a done a pretty good job of setting things up if you can work remotely on 3 megabit. If you're using some sort of VDI it is a lot easier to make it work. I work in IT and we ran into issues with remote users having issues if they had really slow Internet at home. Some of them got cellular hotspots as they are faster.

[Jim Becker]

The largest issues for folks working remotely (work and school) at the present time focuses a lot on upload bandwidth as well as the latency you mention, Steve. Audio and video are particularly susceptible to latency and jitter issues. When you have multiple folks working simultaneously, that adds "extra fun" to the mix. I sure don't miss DSL and other lower bandwidth solutions for sure and am thankful that our service here is symmetrical because it's fiber based, especially since Professor Dr. SWMBO is teaching remotely and has been since last January, often at the same time our younger daughter is fully immersed in her university classes which have been virtual for the same time period. If I were not retired, I'd be adding to the mix, too, and given I was in the telecommunications industry selling (and using constantly) audio/video solutions which were fully IP based. (I worked virtual for almost 21 years, actually, but it was a lot easier in the last ten with all the nice tech to support it. And a fiber connection.

[Steve Demuth]

Your IT department must have a done a pretty good job of setting things up if you can work remotely on 3 megabit. If you're using some sort of VDI it is a lot easier to make it work. I work in IT and we ran into issues with remote users having issues if they had really slow Internet at home. Some of them got cellular hotspots as they are faster.

Since I'm the CTO, I'll take that comment about the IT department as a complement. ;-)

But again, nearly every time we've investigated, the problems our remote workers have are not due to bandwidth per se, but rather to latency and QoS. The latter though, can easily be bandwidth unavailability due to people trying to do dumb stuff. Multiple instances, e.g., of people who called for help because their video conferences had audio issues, despite having completely adequate bandwidth, only to discover that they had a 5Mbs downlink and were trying to watch movies on their second monitor while supposedly working. You don't have 3Mbs if you start with 5, but put a 10Mbs background load on it.

When we sent people home in March last year we actually spent more of our WAN team's time helping carriers in our local geographies debug their routing to raise QoS, than fixing our own issues. In a couple of cases, we had to add new BGP routes and WAN drops to enable them to get packets directly to our front door, rather than running them halfway across the continent before returning home. SE Minnesota to Dallas, back to SE Minnesota, in one case.

[Steve Demuth]

And a fiber connection.

Ironically, if I lived 10 miles south of my present location, I'd have rural fiber to my door, rather than wireless ethernet bouncing off a silo here, and a radio antenna there. Rural telephone cooperatives have built out great kit using their universal service subsidies; CenturyLink wishes fervently that we weren't in their service area and invests accordingly.

[Jim Becker]

Yea, there's some serious need for real infrastructure out there, especially since the world has changed and it's very likely that a notable percentage of folks currently working from home will continue to do so long term. That's a disadvantage for many more rural areas because the traditional carriers have not stepped up. And we can't buy the excuse that "5G" is coming and will be the "solution for everything" because in the rural areas, it's going to be low band which is barely faster than 4G and likely pretty expensive for the consumer for bandwidth, too.