03/17/2020
This article from the NY Times is about the surge in residential internet usage due to school closures and work from home orders caused by social, educational and professional distancing recommendations by the CDC, WHO and the White House.
What does that mean for our techs? There may be an increased amount of Trouble Calls due to the increased need for bandwidth; both real and customer created due to the number of bandwidth hungry apps on their devices. Apps they do not even know are running in the background.
Our outside plant is built to handle the demand, However household bandwidth, particularly Wi-Fi, may slow down due to the addition of telecommuting, teleconferencing and online video learning when placed on top of the normal bandwidth demands of the average household. The most recent estimate of Wi-Fi devices in the average home is eleven. That number will increase as more people bring home and use their work and educational devices.
What can the tech do when faced with frustrated customers trying to access work and educational servers through a VPN for virtual work and learning?
An upgrade in their bandwidth package is the easiest remedy, but the customer must also understand that the household is sharing bandwidth among all of their devices. They must be made to understand that each device when connected to their home network and Wi-Fi will be using bandwidth. All of the enabled apps in each device, will be connecting to receive and transmit data when turned on. To optimize the bandwidth in their home, all devices not in use should be turned off. When in use, all apps not in use should be disabled until needed.
The better we educate our customers in how their devices use bandwidth, the better this temporary surge in residential internet usage will go.
The New York Times is a subscription service, They opened up the paywall for all Covid-19 articles and they can be accessed through logons with Facebook or Google, your email address and a phone number. Click here for the link to the story.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/technology/coronavirus-working-from-home-internet.html.
With millions of people working and learning from home during the pandemic, internet networks are set to be strained to the hilt.
