Why Your Home Internet Can’t Keep Up

Challenges that resellers faced during the COVID-19 pandemic provide valuable lessons we need to learn from going forward. 

In this clip from our webinar, Resellers Helping Resellers, we examine how SIP ALG was a big problem with so many people in each household working from home. 

Transcript:

Andy Abramson: 

What were some of those unique challenges that reared their ugly head during COVID-19 that you had to overcome?

Dan Napolitano

Louis mentioned some of them already, but SIP ALG on cable modems was a big problem, but we’re also an IT firm, so we just own those (problems) for our clients. 

We walk through with the client; we don’t like to tell our client, ‘here’s what you need to do, go do it.’ 

We like to do it with them, for them. And they pay for that (service). But it’s a white-glove kind of service. 

For example, when their kids would wake up and turn on the Xbox, all of a sudden, video meetings would stop working. 

So consultative, things like that, who’s in your house, what are they doing? You know, I’ve got three kids doing their distanced learning, watching movies, and playing video games. You know SD-WAN is a great solution for that problem, but, you know, it’s not really practical in the home.

So, a lot of that was just a matter of educating our clients so that they knew, “Hey, I’ve got a conference call. You can’t be on the Xbox right now.”

We’re fortunate that our area has pretty good bandwidth, so that wasn’t super prevalent, but it popped up.

I don’t know if you guys know about the Glance app, but it’s fantastic for identifying SIP ALG right away, you know. Our team with those tools was pretty good for us to quickly identify those problems. 

Trying to remember what else I told you. And I think that was it.

Andy Abramson: 

Oh, let me look at my list. Limited bandwidth issues, home networking issues, busy line function issues. That was another one.

Dan Napolitano

Yeah. And those were almost always SIP ALG.  

While there is a bevy of solutions for things like bandwidth issues in the office, when your customers have most, if not all, of their staff working from home, their expectations need to change. 

When resellers explain to their customers what to expect when working from home and how to manage those expectations, they’re able to avoid a lot of the problems we faced during the beginning of the pandemic. Want to know more ways resellers are helping resellers? Check out the full webinar right here.