The role of Wi-Fi in the growing hybrid workforce
The rise of the remote workforce has challenged IT teams and network administrators to ensure a smooth Wi-Fi experience for end users and their devices. Since the start of the pandemic, 94% of companies have experienced a permanent increase in the number of employees working from home at least part-time. But the work of most office workers today is nearly impossible without a reliable Internet connection, and the responsibility for ensuring a smooth, reliable Internet connection falls primarily on internal IT teams and MSPs, who need to be up to date with the latest Wi-Fi Fi technology and the tools available to properly manage and maintain it.
Before the pandemic, only 18% of employees worked from home, according to recent research from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). That figure has risen to 43% of employees today and is expected to reach 49% by 2025. Additionally, 39% of the remote workforce consists of hybrid workers who split their time between home and the office, further complicating their Wi-Fi needs.
Network architectures, operations, tools and processes all need to be updated to support this workforce development. In fact, 90% of organizations with hybrid workforces have already made some adjustments by upgrading Wi-Fi networks to meet the increased demands of office mobility.
Wi-Fi 6 technology has made great strides in recent years by providing better security to prevent password guessing attempts, and wider channels that allow multiple devices to transmit simultaneously. These wider channels have doubled the bandwidth available to Wi-Fi access points, allowing greater bandwidth for wireless transmissions and functions.
The updated 6E version of Wi-Fi has already been deployed in about a third of all new Wi-Fi devices on the market, and this percentage is expected to increase in the coming years. To get ahead of this trend, IT decision makers must ensure that all their purchases of new laptops and access points are Wi-Fi 6E enabled.
The biggest challenges to the remote worker experience are weak home Wi-Fi settings, latency due to long distances to business applications, and low-quality internet providers. Another issue mentioned by home users involved shared Wi-Fi in multi-family homes. As a result, supporting this complex shift to remote working has increased the workload of almost three in four network management teams (73%), according to the EMA study.
Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder at Auvik.
Common issues faced by remote users
Several common IT issues can negatively impact a remote user’s experience due to a lack of clear network monitoring and visibility. Network monitoring solutions are used to keep a range of valuable historical data about devices attempting to connect to a network, and to provide notifications if something has failed.
A recurring problem in monitoring concerns the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), which automates the assignment of IP addresses to devices connected to a network. Any misconfiguration of the DHCP server can prevent Wi-Fi users from obtaining an IP address to access the Internet. In other cases, the DHCP server’s list of available IP addresses may be exhausted.
Another concern concerns the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates human-readable domain names into IP addresses so that users can easily access websites and network resources. When users experience slow or irregular website access, the cause is often a DNS misconfiguration or a DNS server that is unavailable or unresponsive.
Network monitoring can help determine how efficiently devices are connecting to the Wi-Fi network. The problem often involves purely human error, such as users entering the wrong password or using outdated drivers that are incompatible with the network configuration.
Another area of concern concerns issues that may affect access point performance. Such problems may include low signal strength in client devices, problems with access point radio channel usage, or high channel usage levels from access points in that area.
The demands on network administrators to ensure end-user experience in terms of connectivity and security will only increase with the wider rollout of Wi-Fi 6E and 7 in the coming years. Network monitoring solutions can help by revealing deep historical data about client connections. These solutions display a time graph and maps of access point locations, including a history of access point associations. Many modern solutions even offer APIs, webhooks, and other useful forms of telemetry to enable near real-time troubleshooting. By applying such consistent, proactive monitoring, network administrators and engineers can gain a more accurate understanding of where things went wrong and what is needed to fix them.
Recent studies such as the EMA report have shown that less than half of IT professionals perform Wi-Fi management, despite more than two-thirds supporting a remote workforce at least some of the time. Furthermore, job performance is highly dependent on the satisfaction of their end user or customer (remote workers). There are few IT problems more ‘unsatisfying’ and frustrating than a bad Wi-Fi connection. IT teams need modern tools to keep their remote workers online, productive, and free from connectivity issues.
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