Finally: Resilient and autonomous networking for cloud-focused businesses
In addition to being excellent tools for collaboration, voice and video are also effective network diagnostic tools. With their sensitivity to circuit conditions, interactive voice and video more easily reveal problems with internet performance that other applications can limp through. A certain amount of packet loss and jitter won’t do much to your email or…
4 common VoIP call problems you can end forever with SD-WAN
As companies ditch their landline phones for VoIP, it’s usually not long before the random VoIP call problems begin and their IT/Ops teams find themselves getting “the complaints.” You know the ones: “I was in the middle of a negotiation and the call dropped!” “It was horrible, we all sounded like we were eating bees!”…
How to create a network that is resilient against internet outages and issues
On August 30th, CenturyLink/Level 3 experienced a widespread internet outage lasting nearly 5 hours. This not only impacted their network and their direct customers, but it also affected many other ISPs and services that connected to their network, directly or indirectly. Each year, there are numerous notable internet disruptions like that one, which can bring…
Why are calls garbled?
When you’re in the middle of an important video conference, the last thing you want is for participants to end up looking like 8-bit video game characters and sounding even worse. In our informal surveys, 80% of IT departments are dealing with quality problems for video and VoIP calls from their team members’ home offices. This…
Four keys to understanding and optimizing home networks
When approximately 85 million people were sent home to work, most of us didn’t know how long it would last or what life would look like “after” the COVID-19 pandemic. Time has passed, and there is still no clear vision of what in-office life will look like in the coming months or years. It’s clear that there’s no going back…
Managing QoS for home office workers remotely
How can IT help everybody who’s working from home? With the sudden, urgent shift to work from home that began in March and the current likelihood that many will continue to work remotely, IT and help desk staff are expanding into new territory. Instead of just on-premise-support, now your IT team is also supporting dozens,…
More bandwidth may not solve your home internet problem
Here’s why Internet access at your team members’ homes is different from what you use at the office. When many of us stopped commuting, our data had to start making a difficult commute instead. We once headed into the office where our data had an easy route to the ISP network point of presence (PoP),…
What is QoS and how do we know if it will help us work from home?
Now that the kids and adults are home across our neighborhoods, all working, schooling, playing, or simply looking for ways to entertain ourselves, we’re all on the internet all the time. This taxes our residential internet connections in unprecedented ways. While all applications that use the internet are impacted by connection quality and bandwidth issues,…
Making home internet work
Making Home Internet Work How to support connectivity for business applications when everyone works from home The challenges of managing IT for our newly remote workforce cannot be overstated. As the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered our offices, the number of Americans working from home went from 15 million to an estimated 92 million. That means you…
Bringing the office home: Create healthy home networks with Bigleaf Home Office
Sometimes a product happens when you least expect it. That’s what happened with Bigleaf Home Office, a service specifically geared for those of us who are now (or have been) working from home. We had always wanted to develop a home office solution, but there were some challenges holding us back that would need to…
How to diagnose and solve home internet issues
Diagnosing Internet Issues for the Home Office Residential internet connections can be a source of frustration for home office users. To a user, phone calls, email, and other internet activity appear seamless and automatic. But behind the scenes, each of these are broken down into packets of information delivered individually over a complicated tangle of…
Upload vs download speed and why it matters in your home office
If you’ve experienced choppy Zoom or Teams calls in your home office, you’re not alone. According to a recent report by Waveform, an estimated 13.2 million of those who work from home are experiencing Internet connectivity issues daily. You may be asking, “But I have a 100 Mbps connection. Isn’t that enough to run Zoom reliably?” Well, that…