Like most other things, 2020 saw unprecedented growth and (at least temporary) acceptance to key employees working remotely. While some worked from home, many others worked from cottages and other remote locations. Along the way, remote workers discovered many hiccups. One such hiccup was issued with remote Internet connections.

This is why, in 2021, any work from home plan must include a cellular gateway.

One benefit to a cellular connection is its flexibility. It can be used as a primary connection or as failover from a fundamental landline connection. It covers up many issues that companies have for a relatively modest investment. 

Here are four factors (2 each for Primary and Secondary connections) to highlight scenarios for using cellular connectivity to work remotely:

 

Primary – If your role requires a highly secure network connection

 

For the first time, many key government roles were forced to work from home. 

This list included judges, diplomats and many in the defence sector. While in the office, IT departments have full control over all aspects of the network. This is not the case at most homes- I mean, no DoD office would have two kids playing Roblox in the next room.

If your connection shares the same network as your kids (even when you are using a VPN), you are unnecessarily exposing your data. By using a dedicated cellular-based connection, you ensure that your data and your systems are completely isolated.

 

Primary – Varying Internet speed can significantly hurt your work performance.

 

How many times have you watched your colleague’s screen freeze up while they are trying to work from an area that has a slow Internet connection?  

In some cases, this becomes so unusable that you waste your time (and that of your customer). Even those that once thought they had a speedy connection found out that with too many people in the neighbourhood using the Internet, it now moved at a snail’s pace.

If your work requires a very stable connection, one way to accomplish this is using a cellular-based connection. Unlike most landline networks, cellular networks do not see record amounts of traffic and offer a very stable and reliable level of performance when you need it.

 

Secondary – Not easy to go to Starbucks if things go down

 

I remember asking a salesperson who worked remotely what his backup plan was for the Internet. He responded, “the corner table at my local Starbucks.” Unfortunately, many cannot get to Starbucks while working from home, namely because they cannot leave their kids alone. As well, most areas are limiting in-person seating at restaurants as I am writing this.

Using a cellular-based connection to back up your Internet connection allows you to have peace of mind. It is especially appealing considering the low cost of cellular data packages when you are not using them often; it is cheap insurance and less addictive than a double Latte.

 

Secondary – You can’t work at all offline

 

It used to be at one point that workers only accessed network storage once in a while. 

Mainly, companies would ask their team to do an update to store critical files on their server. In the age of the cloud, employees are working real-time on networks more and more. This limits the amount of time/ability for employees to work offline in a network outage event.

If this is you, every hour that you do not have Internet connectivity (or at least fast enough connectivity) is an hour of downtime that you cannot afford. This is even more true if much of your work is done collaboratively, as an outage on your end may also affect the productivity levels of other employees.