Making Your Home Internet Office-Quality
People are spending more time at home than ever before.
And that probably won’t change any time soon.
Students are learning at home, employees are doing all kinds of different jobs and careers from home, and a lot of entertainment and relaxation are happening from home.
This has a significant impact on their internet, and usually, it goes down. And if you’re a reseller, your customers will have questions and concerns that they expect you to be able to resolve.
Andy and Louis discuss this very topic in this clip.
Andy Abramson:
What can be done in the home today that you never would have thought of doing before because I’m working from home an hour a day?
I’m not there eight, 10 hours a day, so no one really cared or they would go, “Oh, I’ll call you from my cell phone. My Internet’s going wonky.”
What are you doing today to mitigate that? If you’re not using SD-WAN, what can be done.
Louis LeBlanc:
If anybody has heard of a product called Bigleaf, which is a different type of SD-WAN product, that’s kind of a cloud-first (option) that sits in front of your firewall.
We’ve had tremendous success with this product and all of our clients. They recently came out with a home product as a response to these issues that, that Dan just spoke about, with everybody being at home.
Their product – the pricing is based on a bandwidth usage model, but they’ve scaled it down to make it affordable almost in a loss leader type of sense to help out their clients who have a whole lot of need for this thing.
But I can’t say enough good things. If you haven’t heard of Bigleaf, not just for the home part, but if you have any challenges with quality of service, you put this thing in and you stop hearing from the client. I mean, it’s just amazing, what it’s done for our business.
So, that’s on e product we’ve only had to put it in once at a home spot where they were working from home with multiple kids and, you know, just crushing the network kind of thing. But, it really sings when you have two connections, which most people at home wouldn’t have. But even with one connection, the QoS and the packet prioritization, it does; it’s tremendous how much it’s helped our business.
Andy Abramson:
Lou is that a cloud-managed service that you just go online, you set it up, you point your program, your router to point to a certain IP address? How is it?
Louis LeBlanc:
No, it’s kind of a hybrid system. There’s a physical piece of hardware that they ship you. It’s basically like a little Linux computer, if you will, or it looks like a firewall, but your internet connections plug into it and they give you a new static public IP address and then you plug their box into your existing firewall. The nice thing is you don’t have to change the firewall. It doesn’t affect VPNs. It doesn’t affect any rules you have on the firewall.
What they do is they use your multiple internet connections and create a tunnel from the customer site up to their pops, which are around the country. So they have insight into both of your weigh-ins in real-time and they can move things like voice calls in real-time, from one way into the other and prioritize, whichever one has less latency, less jitter, and less packet loss.
Then of course you have a dashboard where you can see all of that and you get emails. If there’s an alarm on a circuit, all of a sudden it’s producing a lot of jitter. You can call the client or open a ticket with the internet provider.
It just gives you all this insight that you didn’t have before. With a small business firewall, let’s say obviously higher-end firewalls have some capabilities. But if you have a small business that has a two or $300 firewall, this thing, the statistics alone is worth the money: just to be able to call the client and say, “Hey, one of your circuits is down. We need to get it back up in case the other one goes down.”
The ability to have a live VoIP call not disconnect when they lose one of their circuits has paid for itself time and time again, but as most of you guys probably know and any reseller will tell you, it’s not a problem when the circuit going down but, for lack of a better word, when t goes wonky, right?
I mean, coax connections are famous for that. I’m sure we’ve all gotten those calls. “Our internet is not working properly. Our voice quality is horrible.”
They still have internet and their computers are working. But there’s so much jitter on the circuit. You just can’t do anything about it. So, the Bigleaf has solved that problem for us.
to finish answering your question, Andy, that there’s the hardware part that goes up and in front of the firewall. And then you pay a monthly service fee for that ability of where the packet’s going to their data center to do the prioritization before it goes on to the final destination. And it’s based on how fast your circuits are. But anyway, highly recommended; fantastic tech support, fantastic response times, but overall, the product itself is just a winner and it’s done wonders for our business.
Andy Abramson:
So, you could literally have a cable connection coming into one of the WAN ports. So you could have a mobile connection from one of the devices that’s built for industrial-grade, which will keep running. Uh, I’ve seen brands like Peplink and others who make industrial-grade mobile, LTE routers, and soon 5g routers. You can plug one of them into each port. Now are they bonding the two connections as well, or are they just allowing you to flip flop between the two?
Louis LeBlanc:
As far as I can tell, there’s no bonding going on but you can have up to four weigh-ins. And one of them, as you mentioned, being an LTE. Most of our customers will have a fiber circuit and a coax circuit or a co-ax and a DSL circuit. But the benefit is that they can move packets around in real-time based on which circuit is better at that exact moment. And they call it ‘load balancing.’
But let’s say you only had a coax and an LTE that’s limited in bandwidth per month. They have the ability to set the LTE as ‘fail-over only’. So it only, if the coax goes down hard, level seven, then start using the LTD. But if you have unlimited connections, it’s doing load balancing in real-time.
As a reseller, having these possible problems in the back of your mind can do wonders when your customers have these kinds of questions.
Want to be even more prepared? Check out the full webinar right here.