The Remote Worker: From Luxury to Forced Necessity
Aaron Clark, Technical Account Manager at TTx, sat down to discuss the rapid switch of working from home becoming a luxury to now a necessity for most of the workforce today. With entire businesses abruptly switching to remote work, IT teams had to move quickly to support the use of voice communication across multiple home networks, instead of one enterprise network that supports the whole staff. The loss of voice is not something companies can afford to lose when it’s their most used medium to communicate with clients and internally. Unfortunately, with the amount of networks IT teams have to support they are now pulling long hours, almost around-the-clock. TTx is here to help elevate this overwhelming adjustment.
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The Remote Worker Transcript
Aaron: From a voice perspective, we really had to reassess what remote teleworking is, it’s something that’s been around for a number of years. It’s not anything that’s new to us. But if you think about it, it’s been more of a luxury as we talk about maybe a sales team being on the road and having access through mobility features. Chad, you mentioned this rapid enforced change, and we very quickly had to move to, you know, from a luxury standpoint to a forced necessity. I mean, if you think about it, we’ve had departments and, and in a lot of cases, even entire companies that have moved their workforce home, and that’s created a lot of hurdles and probably, not probably, the single biggest one that came out of that from a voice perspective is how do we move phone activity home? And that might seem that might seem like an easy task, but, it certainly isn’t. And there’s a lot that came out of that, that we saw with voice quality and connectivity issues. When we talk about voice quality, it’s voice communications, it’s a real-time thing, and we can’t have delays. We can’t have disconnects. We’ll probably experience to some extent, a little bit of that in this call today, with choppy voice, it’s something that we have lost a lack of control over because when we’re in a corporate network or a corporate environment, there’s a lot of different mechanisms that we can put in place to control that. And we can say what voice takes top priority, top precedence above any other type of communication going on in the network. So in those times where we have bottlenecks and slowdowns voice shoots right to the top of that list and isn’t impacted, and now as we move workers home, we’re working now with home internet service providers that could care less about voice quality and voice priority. They aren’t honoring that. And then you’ve got home grade routers and firewalls that probably don’t have the ability to be configured for honoring and prioritizing those voice packets. So that’s been a real struggle. There’s a lot of added variables to that as well as you think about spouses working from home at the same time, both of them engaging on video conferences, when you’ve got kids that all of a sudden had to do all of their school activity through the internet, you’ve got a little Jimmy streaming, Netflix or playing X-Box live that’s now just adding to all this traffic that’s going on in the home network that sends things out of control when it comes to voice quality.