SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Unreliable home broadband connectivity is the primary technical challenge businesses are having to deal with as remote working continues during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That's one takeaway from a survey of 100 C-level executives and IT professionals in the US by Navisite designed to highlight the biggest headaches for organizations providing IT services to workers since offices began to close in March.
Around half (51%) of those surveyed said they experienced some “IT pains” during the rapid shift to support home workers, while almost a third (29%) continue to face technical challenges.
At the same time, the majority (83%) now expect to continue with remote work policies when pandemic restrictions are lifted.
[...] “Businesses that initially engaged their cloud or managed service provider and said, ‘Give me whatever solution will get me up and running' in the beginning of the pandemic are now taking a more thoughtful approach, much as enterprises are doing with cloud in general,” [Karyn Price] said.
“They are being more strategic about how they deploy remote work technology solutions, as well as to how they manage corporate digital transformation as a whole.”
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2020, @03:10AM (4 children)
But then I'm lucky enough to be in a FIOS service area, and my FIOS has just worked. I've had no issues that have been because of my internet connection.
Now, $works windows10 system, well, yeah, it has acted up numerous times in typical windows fashion. But it would have done that on the office ethernet just as much as on my home FIOS link.
So I wonder how many of these 'issues' are really the poor quality of windows software, but it is being blamed on folk's home internet links rather than the rightful cause, win10, or webex, or ms-teams, or one of the other stinking piles of corporate crap that the bean counters purchase for folks to use.
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Tuesday October 06 2020, @03:24AM (3 children)
Australia got lucky too, they rolled out their high-speed fibre National Broadband Network just in time for Covid19, so now even places like the Oodnadatta pub have easy access to fast, reliable Internet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 08 2020, @09:42AM (2 children)
Is it still FTTN or did they flip-flop back to FTTP again?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday October 08 2020, @09:56AM (1 child)
It's fibre to the nearest suburb, then old copper lines buried by Aborigine settlers in 40,000BC, and then some no.8 fencing wire torn off the dingo fence to cover the last few km.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 09 2020, @08:09AM
That't too bad. The original call for FTTP was an amazingly optimistic proposal but I figured that you'd never go back after the FTTN proposal was passed. The ironic part is that if Australia is anything like the USA, the ones who suffer for that decision are more likely to vote for the people who made it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 06 2020, @03:40AM (3 children)
Significant portions of the population remain second class citizens, because corporate America milks congress for money to be spent on CEO bonuses instead of infrastructure.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2020, @06:31AM
If only Runaway's internet were of a less reliable nature, then up with him we would not have to put!
Besides, network connectivity, either going in, or even worse, coming out, of Arkansas, is a net reduction of the intelligence of the entire network. Do you not remember when Latvia came online?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2020, @01:20PM (1 child)
Fortunately, they also tend to be places that vote for the GOP scum that is against net neutrality and willing to stock the FCC with officials that will engage in obvious fraud to keep it that way.
I have precisely no sympathy for them. They wanted to own the libs, well in this case it's more of a self-own.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2020, @06:07PM
Citations needed. If we accept your dogma, we would expect to find that liberal jurisdictions have much better broadband service than conservative jurisdictions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by srobert on Tuesday October 06 2020, @01:56PM (6 children)
... then is there any limit on how remote workers can be from the office. Do this well. But don't do it too well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2020, @03:43PM
That ends up being an office by office decision.
Some will allow anywhere, others will limit to particular geographic areas (often quoting "national security" as the reason why).
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Tuesday October 06 2020, @05:13PM (3 children)
If the best you have to offer your employer is proximity, then your job is already at risk; and it probably has been for quite some time without you being aware of it.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Tuesday October 06 2020, @07:15PM (2 children)
It's not just the proximity. It's that when you get far enough away, you run into compentent workers who can work for $5 / day. I can't compete with that at any level of competency. No American can.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Tuesday October 06 2020, @09:46PM
While I understand your concern, I think it's far less a threat than you think. The remote working willing to work for $5.00 a day will never be a real threat. If he were a skilled competitor, he would be making much more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 07 2020, @06:57PM
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday October 07 2020, @04:56PM
In the event that you need good latency, you can't work on the moon. In the event you have a good connection, it's possible that being in China, connecting to the USA, may have enough latency to cause stutter. Otherwise, a poor connection from China connecting to a poor connection in the USA will be unintelligible garbage. There's theoretical limits and there's practical limits. Hardware and service varies widely and it's more of a test and see thing than, yeah, it'll work for sure.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2020, @02:04PM (3 children)
What's not mentioned in the article is under-provisioning by ISPs like Comcast. In our case, we have a fast plan (250 down/10up). And normally, it works perfectly. But from about 10am to 3pm every weekday (when school is online), the upload is crap. Video calls are nearly impossible - no one can hear/see me. The entire neighborhood is impacted, not just one house. We've compared notes and everyone is impacted during these times. Download is fine. With Cable, the upload is the tricky part, and Comcast isn't provisioning for it well enough. We've complained since early March when this all started - and nothing has changed. Painful is the only word I have for it.
Competition? DSL from the phone company at ridiculously low speeds. 5G? Nope, not in this area. So, no competition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2020, @03:24PM
250 down/10up. The upload was crap to begin with. And you get "up to" those speeds.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2020, @03:49PM (1 child)
This, unfortunately, is normal for CATV internet.
The CATV system was designed for broadcast distribution in one direction only. From the CATV head end outward to every TV that was attached.
But internet requires two way communication. And they are trying to shoehorn a two way communications pipe into hardware and infrastructure that is natively designed to be one way broadcast.
So yes, they often under-provision the upstream channel bandwidth, because every Mhz they take for upstream internet is a Mhz they can't use for their 500 channels TV packages. And, often, you find entire neighborhoods all constricted to the same single upstream pipe (as you've discovered by querying your neighbors). Every supposedly has 250/10, but reality is, the whole neighborhood has, maybe, a single 30 or 50 upstream pipe, and if enough homes are transmitting upstream, that narrow neighborhood upstream pipe becomes saturated. With the result being what you are seeing.
If you have the option of switching to fiber (you likely do not) then you should switch. With it you don't get shared media for a neighborhood, you get full bi-directional data transmit of your own, nothing your neighbors do will impact your link.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2020, @04:41PM
errr ... no.
gpon is also shared uplink.
gpon is just like wifi but the signal is confined into a glass pipe.
the ONT is the AP and the customers ONU are the clients.
download is broadcast and uplink is time slot...
active fiber is another story. wikipedia is your friend.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2020, @03:41PM
We heavily use VOIP applications and RDP delivered remote applications so latency and packet loss issues will be front-and-center for us. Latency to internal DNS is a big one that affects our applications. We use an SDWAN provider so traffic will tunnel over the local ISP to the provider's geo local POP so we are able to 1:1 correlate ISPs to reported issues.
One observation that surprised me is that the state of Home Wifi equipment is absolutely terrible. I knew this already, more or less, but the surprising part was just HOW terrible it is. Most users just have genuinely terrible wifi access at home and most home wifi equipment is garbage. The first two months of WFH was spent with the service desk convincing users to wire their laptop and getting arguments about how "it was working perfectly before". Now, we are at the point where the first question they ask a user is "Are you one Wifi?"; if the answer is yes, we send them a link to purchase a 100ft Cat6 cable on Amazon and tell them to call back when their laptop is connected via ethernet.
I have thousands of users around the country so we have gotten a pretty good idea about the quality of home ISPs. Any home user who has the option to switch to FiOS or fiber of some kind, has done so.
Cox cable has been particularly bad since Covid. They are oversubscribed so badly that they have been punitively throttling whole neighborhoods when one user "over-consumes". I have had to support WFH users all over the country and Cox has been, by far, the worst. At one point in May, they were only dispatching if we could show packet loss on our circuits =>20%.
My overall impressions based on trouble reports and circuit observations:
Consumer/SMB Fiber:
1. Verizon FiOS has been the most reliable. Latency and packet loss stats are more or less a flat line for all FiOS sites. Former Vz FiOS assets (E.g., Frontier Fios in FL) are similar at the moment.
2. Century Link Fiber is a close second behind Verizon FiOS. Latencies can sometimes be a bit strange as packets have, at times, taken some obviously circuitous routes to get places. From a local access PoV, we have no complaints and home users with CL fiber have had experiences on-par with Verizon FiOS.
3. AT&T U-Verse - this is a brand name for a group of products, some are true FiOS ("Gigapower"), some are Fiber to the local CO and then copper to the location, and some are just DSL. Generally, access is good and speeds are what is advertised but we see packet loss at times that make it feel like a copper circuit. For WFH employees, we generally do not have trouble if they have fiber U-Verse but, again, it is a brand name so sometimes hard to tell what is actually delivered.
Cable (Consumer and Business Cable are the same...)
1. Sparklight has been the best in terms of overall stats. I only have a relatively small presence in their markets but never have issues with Sparklight users and sites. Anecdotal data is anecdotal but this has been our experience.
2. Spectrum depends heavily on the locale. In some places we have no problems, and others we have constant issues. We do have latency issues with home spectrum accounts quite frequently.
3. Comcast is, well, Comcast. Every site that has Comcast get visits from Comcast techs at least twice a year. They are our "reference" crappy service - we use them to benchmark "mediocre/bad" service stats. When we need to show bad connection stats, we pull a Comcast site for random sampling. It is better than DSL but not by much... I have a site with both Comcast cable and Vz Fios - latency for FiOS is 50% of Comcast.
4. Cox is the worst. We have issue at Cox connected sites and every WFH user with Cox as their ISP experiences severe issues. We have unexplained packet loss, latencies that do not follow any particular pattern, and sometimes users are just not able to get connected. Users with Cox will only open internal help tickets now after they have tried calling Cox at least twice.