Remote Work and How to Align Device and Wi-Fi Teams

How 7SIGNAL’s Mobile Eye® can help network managers address remote connectivity issues

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the state of work. While millions of Americans are currently working remotely for health and safety reasons, the trend is likely to continue. According to a PwC survey of 120 executives, 55% of them anticipate that their workers will work from home at least one day a week post-COVID-19.

After spending significant resources on enterprise-grade networking equipment and hardware for the office, it can be a challenge that most employees are now working with low to mid-level equipment, at best. Home setups often result in poor performance and prevent employees from working at the level they’re used to in the office.

Nevertheless, IT teams are now on the frontline of keeping the entire workforce productive. Here are some of the common issues remote employees face, and the industry’s leading solution for getting organizations back on track.

Common home Wi-Fi issues

• Co-Channel Interference (CCI): CCI occurs when two or more routers are on the same frequency. It’s fairly common in a home environment with this type of setup. Unfortunately for users, CCI causes delays as devices have to wait in a queue until the transmission line is free. This can lead to poor performance and subpar device connections.
• Adjacent Channel Interference (ACI): Adjacent or partially overlapping channels add noise and interference to a transmission. Users will most often experience this in apartment complexes and condos where there are many networks.
• Roaming: Employees working from home tend to move locations reasonably frequently, especially individuals who don’t have a dedicated workspace. They may bounce from room to room and floor to floor depending on noise level, kid activities, acoustics, and any other number of reasons. Roaming issues occur when devices fail to transition from router to router to maintain the connection. Unlike other problems here, roaming faults are usually caused by the device itself or adapter and driver combinations, and they typically only occur in larger homes.
• Congestion: Just like a traffic jam, multiple devices on a network can slow down connection speeds. Equipment will wait to send packets to the router until the frequency is quiet, so a lot of “chatter” will delay transfers. Employees working from home with spouses and kids who each have multiple devices are most likely to encounter this issue.
• Coverage: A lot of people bury their unsightly routers away in a bookcase or behind a shelf, which stifles performance and can cause connection issues in various parts of the home.
• End-to-end: As previously mentioned, most employees are not working with state-of-the-art equipment at home. They may be used to the enterprise-level set up in the office and discover their home network can’t handle the applications they need. If they have a setup for casual browsing and streaming, they may need an upgrade.

Align your remote employees and network managers with Mobile Eye

Expecting IT teams to manage and optimize the networks of every employee working remotely is a tall order. But 7SIGNAL’s Mobile Eye offers a unique solution to identifying and fixing Wi-Fi issues at home.

Mobile Eye is a SaaS application that can be installed on any Windows, macOS, or Android device to monitor wireless devices. The application runs passive and active Wi-Fi tests around the clock so network managers can identify issues and keep applications performing at full capacity.

The key difference between Mobile Eye and other network monitoring solutions is that it monitors network performance from the end-user’s perspective. By installing the application on employees’ devices, everyone can report on their individual Wi-Fi experiences. This crowdsourced approach to monitoring gives IT teams ultimate visibility into performance and device behaviors.

Employees won't even notice Mobile Eye exists. The Wi-Fi tests run discreetly in the background at predetermined intervals, and the results are automatically uploaded to the cloud. 

7SIGNAL's intuitive reports and dashboards give instantaneous feedback on all of the issues outlined above. This allows IT teams to identify and resolve issues before an end-user even experiences it.

Align your teams for greater efficiency

When employees work remotely, your traditional networking infrastructure and performance tools cannot help you address their home connectivity issues. But Mobile Eye eliminates the guesswork IT teams face when troubleshooting connectivity issues from afar

Contact us today to learn more about this solution.

Related read>>> Ready for the New Work-from-Home Normal?

7SIGNAL® is a leader in Wireless Experience Monitoring. The 7SIGNAL platform is a cloud-based Wi-Fi performance management solution that continuously monitors the wireless network for performance issues—maximizing network uptime, device connectivity, remote worker productivity, and network ROI. The platform was designed to support the Wi-Fi management needs of the world's largest organizations, educational institutions, hospitals, and government agencies. 7SIGNAL continuously monitors the connectivity of over 5 million global devices. Learn more at www.7signal.com.