Yesterday’s corporate network design isn’t working for working from home

Enlarge / Multitudes are working from home. This changes how business' networks work. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

We're 10 months into 2020, and businesses are still making adjustments to the new realities of large-scale telework (which, if you're not in the IT biz, is just a fancy term for "working from not in the office"). In the Before Times, telework was an interesting idea that tech companies were just starting to seriously flirt with as a normal way of doing business-whereas now, most businesses large or small have a hefty fraction of their workforce staying home to work.

Unfortunately, making such a sweeping change to office workflow doesn't just disrupt policies and expectations-it requires important changes to the technical infrastructure as well. Six months ago, we talked about the changes the people who work from home frequently need to make to accommodate telework; today, we're going to look at the ongoing changes the businesses themselves need to make.

We're going to need a bigger boat pipe

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  This small business was hurting very badly on the afternoon shown-it's blowing through its 20Mbps upload pipe nearly nonstop for a half-hour straight during the peak of the workday. [credit: Jim Salter ]

The most obvious problem that businesses have faced-and are continuing to face-with a greatly multiplied number of remote workers is the size of the company's Internet connection. If you need a quarter-or half, or three quarters-of your workforce to remote in to work every day, you need enough bandwidth to accommodate them.

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