working from home and minimum broadband speeds

Hello all

I’m about to leave dirty London behind and embark on a new adventure to the countryside. Unfortunately still working 2-3 days a week in London and the rest working from home. What I’m discovering though is that it’s difficult to find anywhere sufficiently rural with what I would consider good (in the region of 20mbps+) internet speeds.

So the question is what would you consider to be the minimum speed for working from home?

I’ll be working over a virtual machine which is supposedly pretty efficient, my head of IT suggested 1mbps would be acceptable. But my wife is a freelance graphic designer so will moving very large amounts of data around.

Would something around 7mbps be unbearably slow?

Whatever speed you have will be less than you want. I have > 70Mb down and I still find myself moaning once in a while.

When I’m working away from home, I find that I can fairly easily adapt and think ahead so that it is not too much of a problem on a slow link.

Reliability is the main thing; not speed.

Rachel

My wife and I both work from home, over VPNs, with a broadband connection that rarely gets over 1Mbps. Most of the time it’s fine for email, browsing, getting and sending files of a few Mb in size. Moving big files is a pain – something of a few 100Mb would be an action I’d only want to do once or twice a day. Files in the Gb size range is an overnight job. Personally I’d be overjoyed to get 7Mbs, but whether it would work for your wife, I don’t know.

[sometime this year we’ll hopefully be on the B4RN rural broadband network – 1Gbs symmetrical for 30GBP a month. Cannot wait!]

It’s a good question, but the problem is what you actually ‘see’ in terms of speed and what you buy in terms of what is quoted are so very different and so many variables affect it that it’s hard try and mitigate for them.

It also really depends on what you’re work flow will be; I’m not remotely technical but the ‘virtual machine’ sounds like you’ll be using/accessing programmes and files from your company server rather than runing them locally?

Having been a predominantly home based worker for seven years, I would suggest that a service advertised/quoted at 20mbps would give you enough leeway to manage the variations in speed and other demands.

I currently enjoy around 70mbps actual speed but the service quote is ‘up to 120mbps’.

It’s upload speeds that slow things down on a VPN i find.

I’ve been out in the sticks for 10+ yrs working as a freelance. For much of that we had speeds <2Mbps

Our corner of Mordor was plumbed into “superfast” broadband just over a year ago and we now bathe in the heady froth of 20Mbps.

This is great for iPlayer/Google movies/XHamster Ocotopron etc. But that’s not work. In reality it has negligible effect on the ability to do work. Even at 2Mbps I could do (low bw) video calls, and I have been using google office suite for that whole time also without really any major issues.

Find the largest file your wife is likely to upload and calculate the speed at which it will be acceptable to her.

Sounds like upload speed will be more important than download speed to her. (download is usually faster by a significant factor with BB, so focus on upload speeds.)

You sound like you’ll be fine regardless (going by your IT dude.)

This is great for iPlayer/Google movies/XHamster Ocotopron etc.

What are ‘XHamster’ and ‘Octopron’?

Depends what you do for a job, but I usually get around 17mbps (against a 50mbps service) and that is perfectly fine for my work stuff. I can upload and down load large files containing media to our LAN drives quite quickly, emailing and accessing tools is fine, webex’s work fine.

We have 3Mbps down and 2Mbps up (Rural Dorset). Works ok-ish for basic email, Skype office and browsing as long as nobody else in the house is online. A friend who works with music simply times his uploads/downloads to run at night.

That said we are hopefully getting super fast fibre some time soon.

Contention ratio can also be a factor.

So the question is what would you consider to be the minimum speed for working from home?

I have 3Mbps down and 0.75Mbps up (the up speed is important too).

I can use remote desktop and I don’t even notice lag (and I’m fussy). I can even just about use it whilst the kids are watching netflix, but it gets laggy then so I try not to.

Downloads are a PITA though. I have to down/upload stuff overnight.

What I’m discovering though is that it’s difficult to find anywhere sufficiently rural with what I would consider good (in the region of 20mbps+) internet speeds.

You’ve moved to the wrong area then 😉

I have 3Mbps down and 0.75Mbps up (the up speed is important too).

I had about the same for a couple of years and found it just about OK as long as no-one else in the house was loading up the internet (Netflix or the like).

Thankfully we’ve just been upgraded to fibre though!

Ours is pretty slow but it isn’t an issue for work. Very occasionally if I’m working on a big file I have to send a supplier a link but say that can’t download it for a few hours while it uploads. All happens in the background though. I’d say reliability is more important than speed although they tend to go together.

I work from home in a pretty network intensive environment and don’t have any issues with my 25Mbps link.

I used to have a 7 Mbps ADSL line and the only real issue i had then was moving large files across the VPN, my virtual desktop experience and access to network resources the other side of the VPN link wasn’t too bad.

We’ve got 20mbs in village in Yorkshire which is fine, it’s one of the reasons we went for a village rather than middle-of-nowhere rural. TBH work isn’t really more demanding than streaming TV etc. Used to have something risiculous like 1000mbs at work but the limiting factor is often the server at the other end anyway.

4.5Mbps at home in a town of around 15,000, and I have to move gigabytes of data a few times a year. It’s very annoying sometimes, but possible with planning. It’s fine for most other stuff, and occasionally I’ll just travel to a friend’s office or into Manchester to get decent bandwidth.

Depending on where you’re looking to live, B4RN’s coverage area[/url] is worth a look. They run gigabit fibre to the home for £30 a month including VAT. The incumbent networks in this country are arseclowns, and B4RN are getting it done.

5MB down and 0.5MB up for us at work, shared across 13 of us (software development, installation and support) – not the best but it works and is only a problem if someone downloads/uploads something huge, then it’s usually quicker for someone to drive home and do it there 🙂

Hopefully we’ll have a leased line in next month, prices have finally come down to a reasonable price (£50k construction and £1k per month for 100/100)…

I’ll be working over a virtual machine which is supposedly pretty efficient

VM or VPN?

VPN just does the virtual connection.

If you’re doing remote desktop to a desktop/server or virtual machine, then the remote desktop protocol (assuming this is Windows) is quite efficient. It will also scale down for lower speed connections and not bother with stuff like fancy backgrounds and transparent windows.

1Mbps is adequate for remote desktop sessions, more is better.

If you’re flinging large files between home and office then you really could do with more, or otherwise invest in a good coffee machine so you can go for a brew for an hour while you wait for files to transfer.

Also files from home to office will need a good upload speed.

If you have a slow connection but can harness the power of the remote machine to actually do all the work, you can remote desktop and just use the remote machine without transferring big files. Though graphic design stuff would be far better working on your own machine at home. Plus if the line goes down you’re stuffed working completely with a remote machine.

Anyway mine is 76 down, 20 up and way more than adequate for my freelance software development 😀

Thanks all

I’ll be using a virtual machine. Basically all files held and computing done on the sever in the office and just an image sent back and forth. Or something like that. I don’t think my use will be a problem at all. If it stops working temporarily I’ll be able to get files emailed (assuming 3-4g works) and work off the desktop for a while. Or go to the pub and steal their wifi.

The wife will be using adobe creative cloud and probably downloading and sending illustrator, indesign and large PDFs regularly and doing a fair bit of tutoring over video links. She also likes watching Netflix while working. She’s lovely but quite bandwidth hungry.

Looking around Shropshire so B4RN not available yet.

My business partner and I live 90 mins drive away from each other so usually work from home and use G Suite and hangouts. I have 50mps, he has 5mbps. Some days it’s fine and hangouts is open all day so we’re in a virtual office together, most days his connection means we have to turn video off to get reliable voice

@cheers_drive: yup, much the same. Skype office (or similar) is fantastic for an office ‘environment’ whereby it’s useful to be hearing each others calls and contacts. Especially useful in a training situation – so much refinement is lost through the inherently negative tone of emails. Being able to listen to each others conduct is a very valuable tool, but ultimately you don’t really need to see them.

@bodgy my business partner just boots turns WiFi off to boot anyone else off the network, his pc is connected via a powerline.
We use some pretty big cad and graphics files which are constantly uploading over Google drive, sometimes the syncing has to be pauses if it uses too much bandwidth