Working from home became more than just a trend. It’s a lifestyle. A temporary fix to the current Covid-19 pandemic and financial crisis worldwide. Or maybe a permanent work environment. Remote work is here to stay, without a doubt! It’s the new normal where millions of employees do not even want to go back to the office. And as with every new era, this era brought a lot of technical requirements when it comes to the work-from-home concept.
The most important part of a work-from-home employee is to have a stable and secure Internet connection. This will allow you to communicate with your colleagues, finish your daily tasks and stay in touch with the rest of the company, clients, and customers. However, many remote workers face difficulties when it comes to choosing the right Internet Service Provider. For that purpose, we’ve decided to put together a list of the best guiding principles in finding the best ISP.
Have The Right Equipment
Before going any further into detail, make sure you are aware of the process of choosing an Internet Service Provider. Are you looking to improve your Internet connection while working remotely or increase the speed? Or maybe you are considering changing your current provider. To get the most out of the bundled packages and deals, you need to compare broadband plans and select the package that offers the best features and options.
Sometimes all it takes to improve the Internet connection is to have the proper gear like Wi-Fi/WLAN extender and repeater. The extender is a portable device that connects to the existing network and duplicates the signal. The duplicated signal is then broadcasted so that you can move to a new location and still have a good connection. The WLAN receiver is directly connected to the router via ethernet cable so it gives higher capability and power.
Understand Your Needs
To begin with the setup of your home workplace, you need to make sure the Internet connection is fast enough. An easy way to do that is to perform a speed test offered by many platforms for free. You’ll need to be connected to the Internet, either via ethernet connection or Wi-Fi, and click on the starting button in the app. So that connection interruptions are avoided.
A different set of activities requires different Internet speeds. Video conferencing or uploading large files take diverse amounts of data and speed. If you are using only social media, email, and audio conference calls, a download and upload speed of 2 Mbps might be enough for your work tasks. On the other hand, for uploading and downloading larger files, 10 Mbps is recommended. And if multiple people are working from home, 25 Mbps or higher Internet speed is preferred.
Secure Connection
For sensitive and important information, it’s crucial to have a secure connection. A lot of companies rely on VPNs nowadays to enable their employees a continuous workflow. Make sure you are protected online since there are a lot of VPN options that you can test at home. Internet Service providers offer different packages with different speeds, beyond the speed test VPNs.
And sometimes, your Internet connection might get interrupted out of nowhere. Internet outages happen all the time, everywhere. So, you can check the status of your Internet on the official website of your ISP. It’s always better to have more information than to lack thereof.
What’s a Good Internet Speed?
When working from home, we always recommend a minimum of 50 to 100 Mbps. As we mentioned before, different tasks might require multiple speed sets. However, if you want a stable connection, you should be okay with it at least 50 Mbps. You are not just working from home, you are representing your company, tackling important projects and deadlines, and certainly, you don’t want an Internet connection that will give you headaches most of the time.
Download speed of 100 Mbps is recommended for families that work from home. It’s always to be better safe than sorry. And after your work responsibilities are over for the day, you can easily relax with an episode of “Star Wars” or a session of “Call of Duty”.
In other instances, if you have a smart home and a lot of smart devices connected to it, the recommended Internet speed is 200 Mbps. We recommend this speed range due to the high amount of Internet power used in such households.
Work Traffic
Most of the routers operate 2.4 and 5GHz bands whereas the 5GHz band is faster. While the 2.4GHz band offers a better range. If you work with one of these two bands to organize the work traffic, you can have other family members apart from your Internet traffic. And you can always put an optional guest network to prevent your kids and other family members from eating up too much bandwidth.
