Tomer Yudelevitz || Marketing ||
As COVID-19 continues to spread around the world, more businesses are coping with networking challenges related to the new WFH (working from home) model. This requires ongoing technology adjustments that will maintain the same efficiency and quality of work as in physical offices to keep the business environment alive, fast and responsive as usual.
As a result, more and more remote technologies are being used to connect and secure remote office connections (such as VPNs) and the private and public sectors are getting an experience that emphasizes the limitations of today’s technology.
ISPs and MNOs being confronted with an unforeseen spike in bandwidth use that they need to address. Some of them might have been more prepared than others, but none of them had planned for an event on such an epic and global scale. That being said, what can you as an ISP or MNO do now and in the (near) future? The following are six ways to adjust your network to the new reality:
- Increase Your Network Capacity
There is no way around it; it’s all about capacity, capacity, and more capacity. To illustrate: Vodafone reports a 50% rise in internet usage since COVID-19 started to affect Europe, and Netflix and other video streaming services had to reduce the video quality of their streams to meet demand. The reason is simple: internet providers around the world weren’t ready to handle these huge amounts of traffic due to the pandemic. Once enough capacity is available, there is no need for video streaming services to take these kinds of measurements.
- Offer CIR Packages
Although offering Committed Information Rate (CIR) packages is often seen as more of an old sales pitch, it’s still relevant Especially nowadays, it’s important for your customers to know exactly what they are paying for, and can add more value to you as an ISP.
- Prioritize Your Network Data
This will help you to decide how and when to prioritize your network traffic and necessary protocols. The key factor is to monitor the traffic at a macro level 24/7 to prioritize the best possible way for everybody. Once 4K streaming protocols congest your network, you can reduce the amount of traffic, especially if it’s happening at specific hours. Sometimes VoIP calls should have priority over video ones, at other times video streaming is more important than video games apps, It all depends on the cause of the congestion.
- Offer Localized VAS Services
In itself, offering Value Added Services is nothing new for ISPs and MNOs, but consider the following: As long as you can offer local services which hardly rely on international connections such as VOIP, video conference, Videogames, TV, and audio streaming, you can make it all work far more smoothly. Apart from ensuring high audio/video quality, you will have a competitive edge which will strengthen your brand and reputation.
- Use SD-WAN
A software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solves issues such as packet loss, high latency, and congestion. It helps you to optimize your bandwidth capacity due to the virtual WAN architecture with elastic traffic management.
- Upgrade Your Customer Relations & Support Team
Once the usage of your network increases, you will probably receive more and more customer requests and complaints. Use these as a great opportunity to be in contact with your customers. As we all know, nothing is as powerful as a human voice telling your customers that everything is going to be OK, and in a world that went wrong, that’s a lot.
To learn more about our network solutions please contact us at info@gilat.net
