The Home Network Variable: Slow-Internet Tickets From Home

Monday, 09:20, at Ashgrove Housing. The ticket is from Paul, a housing officer who works from home three days a week. And it says: "VPN has been unusable since last week. Calls drop, the case system takes a minute per screen, can't get anything done. Please sort." Nadia opens it and does what she would do for anyone in the building: she asks what exactly is slow, who else has it, and since when. Then she stops, because the next step in the office would be to walk over with the spare laptop. Paul is forty miles away in a converted loft above a kitchen, on a connection Ashgrove does not pay for. He connects through a router Ashgrove has never seen. He shares a line with two teenagers who are, at 09:20 on a Monday, almost certainly not at school.

The home network variable is everything between a remote worker's laptop and the public internet that the organisation does not own, cannot see and did not choose. That includes the household's provider and line, the router the provider supplied, and the walls of the house. It also includes the other people and devices sharing the connection. The home network variable is the branch of the isolation frame where the desk's reach ends, and the honest desk knows exactly where. This article is part of our The Internet Is Slow series. The four-way frame in the first article still applies at home. What changes is that the network branch splits into the part the desk owns, the laptop and the VPN, and the part it does not. The house is the part it does not own.

It covers where the desk's reach ends, what the desk can still diagnose from a distance, and the household bandwidth. Next come the distance from the router, the VPN factor, and the provider and the line at home. Then comes the honest boundary and what the desk says. A short war story and the home-network self-check to copy come last, in that order.

Where the Desk's Reach Ends

Draw the line before the first ticket, because the line is a policy, not a judgement made at 09:20 under pressure. The organisation owns the laptop, the software on it, the VPN client, the accounts and the services at the far end. The desk supports all of those at home exactly as it would in the office. The organisation does not own the household's connection, the router, the wiring of the house, or the other devices on it. And the desk does not fix those, because it cannot see them, cannot change them, and has no standing with the provider that supplies them. Between the two sits a small grey area, the advice the desk gives about the house. This article is mostly about doing that grey area well.

What the desk supports at home, and what it does not, is a policy decision that belongs to the organisation and is written up in What the Desk Supports at Home, and What It Does Not. This article takes the policy as given and deals with the slow-internet ticket inside it. The common shape of the policy is simple. The desk diagnoses and advises. The desk never touches the household's equipment. And the organisation decides separately what kit it will provide for a home office. A desk without that line will be drawn into fixing routers by phone. And a desk with it will be accused of unhelpfulness by someone who has not read it. The second is cheaper. (It is also, in my experience, far rarer than the first.)

The boundary is not a refusal. A remote worker whose connection is bad cannot work, and that is the organisation's problem whether or not the cause is the organisation's. The desk's job inside the boundary is to find out, honestly and quickly, which side of the line the cause is on. The desk fixes it if it is on the desk's side. It gives the person a clear, specific thing to do or ask for if it is on the other. "Not ours" is the end of the diagnosis, not the beginning of it, and the diagnosis is what the person is owed.

What the Desk Can Still Diagnose From a Distance

The three questions from the isolation frame work at home with the proofs changed. And the desk can run most of them by phone in a few minutes. "What exactly is slow" sorts one service from everything, as it does in the office. If the case system is slow and a plain public web page loads normally, the house is probably innocent and the VPN or the far end is the suspect. "Who else" becomes two questions. Is anyone else at Ashgrove on the VPN seeing it? The desk can check that in a minute. Is anyone else in the house seeing it? The person can check that by asking. "Since when" is the same question it always is. And "since the provider sent a new router" or "since my son got a games console" is as good an answer as "since Monday".

The desk's proofs at home are the laptop, the VPN and the comparison. The laptop is the desk's and gets the device checks. These include another device in the house doing the same task, the wireless adapter off and on, and updates and background transfers. They also include the dock if there is one, and a cable to the router if one can be found. The VPN is the desk's too, and its effect on speed is large enough to have its own section below. The comparison is the person's phone, doing the same simple task. It is on the home wireless, then on its own mobile service with the home wireless turned off. Slow on both is the far end or the laptop. Slow on the home wireless and fine on mobile is the house. The person has just done the single most useful test available without the desk touching anything.

Where the policy allows it, the most telling test is the same task with the VPN disconnected, for a plain public page that does not need the VPN. Fast off the VPN and slow on it is the VPN factor. Slow on both is the house or the laptop. Many organisations route everything through the VPN by policy and do not permit this test. Where that is the case, the phone-on-mobile comparison does most of the same work. What the desk cannot do from a distance is the known-good device beside the slow one. The honest substitute is the second device in the house, which is weaker evidence and still worth having. The method of taking readings that mean something, the same test from the same spot at the same times, is in Measuring Slow. And the self-check at the end of this article is that method cut down to what a person can do alone in ten minutes.

The Household Bandwidth

A home connection is shared like an office one, and the sharers are less predictable. The upload figure on a typical home line is small, often a fraction of the download. And a video call sends the person's picture out over it. So does a cloud backup, a phone synchronising photographs, a games console updating, and a second worker's call in the next room. Two calls and a console update can flatten a modest upload entirely. The person on the call sees a frozen picture and a dropped meeting, and reports the VPN. Download suffers less often but it suffers. A television streaming in high quality to an empty room is a steady draw. Three of them on a school holiday is a different connection from the one the person tested in September.

The tell is the time of day and the household's timetable. Slow at 09:20 on a weekday in term time and fine at 09:20 in the holidays is a household problem with a calendar. Slow every evening from six is the family coming home. Slow for an hour mid-morning on Tuesdays is whatever is scheduled for Tuesday mornings, and the person usually knows what that is once asked. The desk asks the question plainly and without judgement, because nobody is doing anything wrong by watching television in their own house. The question is only what the line is being asked to carry.

The advice is to move the work-critical thing off the shared moment where possible. That could mean calls at a time the household is quieter and the laptop's own backup scheduled for the evening. It could mean the console's updates set to run overnight and a frank word with the household about the hour of the weekly team meeting. The desk cannot enforce any of this and should not try. What it can do is tell the person what is competing for their line, so that the fix is theirs to make rather than a mystery they keep raising tickets about.

The Distance From the Router

The router the provider supplied sits where the line enters the house, which is usually the hall or the lounge. The person works where there is a desk, which is usually as far from the hall as the house allows. Between the two are walls, floors, a kitchen full of metal and water, and whatever the loft conversion was lined with. The person's laptop is on the far edge of the router's bubble, at one or two bars. Every symptom of a weak office corner applies: slow, dropping, worse when the microwave runs, better when they carry the laptop downstairs. A weak signal at home is the single most common cause of a "slow VPN" ticket from a remote worker. And the VPN had nothing to do with it.

The proof is the carry test: the same task done at the desk, then at the foot of the stairs, then beside the router. If it gets better as the laptop gets closer, the house is the branch. The fixes are the household's, and the desk advises rather than installs. One option is to move the router if the provider's cable allows it, or move the desk. Another is to run a cable from the router to the desk, which is the cheapest and most reliable fix in the whole article. Or add a second wireless unit that extends the signal, which most providers and shops sell in plain boxes. The desk does not recommend a product. It describes the options and lets the person choose.

Whether the organisation pays for any of this, a cable, an adapter, a second wireless unit, is the home-office equipment question, and it is answered in Home-Office Equipment: What the Organisation Provides rather than here. What this article will say is that a long network cable is the one piece of kit that takes the house out of the argument entirely. It costs less than the second ticket and is the first thing the desk should mention. People resist it on grounds of tidiness. The cable does not mind.

The VPN Factor

A VPN, a virtual private network, is a secure tunnel from the laptop to the organisation's network. It changes the speed of everything that goes through it for a reason nobody explains to the person using it. The traffic travels to the office and back before it goes anywhere. A remote worker on a VPN that carries all their traffic, often called a full tunnel, is browsing the public internet through the office's connection. That means every page they open is downloaded by the office and then uploaded to them over the office's upload figure. That upload figure is shared with everyone else doing the same thing. Twelve people at home on a full-tunnel VPN are twelve people whose internet is the office's upload speed, divided twelve ways.

The alternative, a split tunnel, sends only the organisation's own traffic through the VPN and lets the rest go straight to the internet from the house. It is faster for the person and harder for the organisation to secure. The choice between the two belongs to whoever owns security, not to the desk. That is why the desk explains the factor and never changes it. The mechanics of what works where on each kind of tunnel are in Connected But Can't Reach It: Split Tunnels and What Works Where. That article also covers the tickets that come from people who are connected and still cannot reach things. Here the point is diagnostic. A person who is fast off the VPN and slow on it has found the VPN factor. In that case, the fix is either the organisation's upload capacity, the tunnel policy, or an honest expectation.

The honest expectation is that the VPN will always be slower than no VPN. The amount depends on the office's upload figure and on how many people are on it at once. This is the price of the tunnel rather than a fault. Say so plainly, with the time of day, because the VPN is slowest when the most people are on it, which is mid-morning on the days most people work from home. The desk cannot make a shared upload larger. It can say, with the readings, that the shared upload is full at ten on Mondays. That is the sentence that starts the sizing conversation with whoever pays for the office line.

The Provider and the Line at Home

The household's provider is the person's own supplier, on the person's own contract. And the desk does not call them, cannot call them, and should not promise to. What the desk can do is make the person's own call shorter and more successful, by telling them what to measure and what to say. A provider's support line will ask the same things an office provider asks. What speed are you getting, wired or wireless, at what time, compared with what you pay for? A person who rings with "my work VPN is slow" will be told to ask their employer. A person who rings with three days of wired readings at the router, against the figure on their own contract, will be taken seriously. Those readings are taken on a phone or a personal device rather than the work laptop.

So the desk's advice for the provider call is specific and short. Find the contract figure. Test on a cable at the router from a personal device with the household quiet. Write the time. Do it three times across a day, and ring with the figures. The desk also says what it is not. The organisation will not negotiate with the household's provider. It will not pay for a faster line unless the home-office policy says so. It will not diagnose the router. Where the person's line is simply too small for the job, which happens, the conversation moves to the policy and to the person's manager. The desk's part in that conversation is the readings that show the line is the limit.

The Honest Boundary and What the Desk Says

The reply to a home slow-internet ticket has four parts, and the fourth is the one that most desks leave out. First, what the desk checked on its side: the laptop, the VPN, whether other remote colleagues are seeing it. Second, what the evidence points to, in plain words, without blame: the signal in the loft, the household's upload at nine, the full tunnel at ten on Mondays. Third, the specific things the person can do or ask for, with the cheapest first. Fourth, what the desk will do next and when, even if the answer is "nothing more on the network, but I will check the laptop readings again on Thursday". A reply with the first three and not the fourth reads as a door closing.

Never say "it's your home network" as a diagnosis. It is a location, and it is where the person has to live and work. "The readings show the laptop is at the edge of the router's signal in the loft. The quickest fix is a cable from the router to the desk, which the home-office kit covers. A second wireless unit is the alternative. I have checked the VPN and the laptop and both are behaving. I will look at the readings again once you have tried the cable" is the same finding with a person in it. Supporting people at a distance, including the remote-control session the desk may need to see the laptop itself, is the subject of Remote Support for People Working From Home. The boundary in this article is about the house, not the laptop, and the laptop is always the desk's.

Put the self-check where the person can find it before they raise the ticket. A knowledge base article visible to everyone has the ten-minute self-check from the end of this article and a line saying what to put in the ticket. Such an article turns the first exchange from "it's slow" into four readings and a carry test. If you run QuerySolv, that is an article in the knowledge base that anyone can see. In QuerySolv, the form the remote team raises tickets on can ask for the self-check results in its own fields. In any tool, the aim is that the ticket arrives with the evidence rather than the adjective. Half the home tickets will not arrive at all. The other half will arrive diagnosed.

A Short War Story: The Overnight Uploads at Larkspur Media

At Larkspur Media, a design agency, a remote designer called Hana spent three weeks uploading finished artwork to the agency's file service overnight. During the day each upload crawled and timed out. The first reply from a technician called Elliot had been that home connections were outside the desk's scope and she should speak to her provider. She did, and the provider's test showed a healthy line with a good upload figure. She reported that back. The ticket sat for a fortnight with "awaiting user" on it. A second technician picked it up during a backlog review and asked her to try one plain upload with the VPN disconnected. The technician watched it finish in a tenth of the time. The agency's VPN carried all traffic through the office. The office's upload was being shared at ten each morning by every remote designer sending artwork at once. The line had been bought for an office of twelve people who mostly received files rather than sent them. The security owner reviewed the tunnel policy for the file service that week, and the agency's line was upgraded the next quarter on the strength of the readings. The cost was three weeks of a senior designer working evenings and two late deliveries to clients. It also included a line in her exit interview some months later about feeling that the desk had sent her away. The lesson the desk wrote down was that "outside scope" is a verdict. And a verdict needs a diagnosis first, which in this case would have taken four minutes.

The Home-Network Self-Check

The self-check below is written for the person at home, not the technician. And it belongs in the knowledge base visible to everyone with a link from the remote team's ticket form. It takes about ten minutes, needs only the work laptop and a phone, and produces the six lines the desk needs to sort the ticket on the first reply. Section A is the three questions in the person's own words. B is the comparison with the phone, and C is the carry test. D is the VPN test, which the person skips if policy does not allow disconnecting. E is what goes in the ticket. The desk fills nothing in. The person does, and pastes the result into the ticket. Keep it plain, keep it joke-free, and keep the steps in this order, because each one rules something out for the next.

WORKING FROM HOME — SLOW CONNECTION SELF-CHECK (about ten minutes)
Your name: ______________   Date: ________   Where you work in the house: ______________

A. THREE QUESTIONS
   What exactly is slow? (calls / one system / web pages / file uploads / everything): ______________
   Is anyone else in the house finding the internet slow right now?  yes [ ]  no [ ]  not sure [ ]
   Since when? ______________   Anything change around then (new router, new device, moved desk)? ______________

B. THE PHONE COMPARISON (same simple web page each time)
   Phone on the home wireless, at your desk ........ fast [ ]  slow [ ]   time ________
   Phone on its own mobile service, wireless off ... fast [ ]  slow [ ]   time ________
   Work laptop, at your desk ....................... fast [ ]  slow [ ]   time ________

C. THE CARRY TEST (work laptop, same page or task at each spot)
   At your desk ........... fast [ ]  slow [ ]   signal bars: ____
   Halfway to the router .. fast [ ]  slow [ ]   signal bars: ____
   Beside the router ...... fast [ ]  slow [ ]   signal bars: ____
   With a cable to the router, if you have one ... fast [ ]  slow [ ]  no cable [ ]

D. THE VPN TEST (only if your organisation allows disconnecting; otherwise skip)
   Plain public web page with the VPN connected ...... fast [ ]  slow [ ]
   Same page with the VPN disconnected ............... fast [ ]  slow [ ]
   Reconnect the VPN before continuing work.

E. WHAT TO PUT IN THE TICKET
   Paste sections A to D.  Add: what else was using the connection (calls, streaming, backups,
   consoles, other people working): ______________   The time of day it is worst: ________
   Your provider's contract speed if you know it: ____ down / ____ up

Nadia sent Paul the self-check at 09:35. His results came back at 09:50. The results showed slow on the phone on home wireless, fast on mobile, and fast beside the router. He had one bar in the loft and a console updating in the room below. He ran a cable up the stairs that afternoon and taped it to the skirting. His next ticket, a month later, was about a printer. The internal note on the first ticket says "house: loft signal and household upload; laptop and VPN fine; cable advised, kit policy linked". The follow-up on Thursday that Nadia had promised took one line to write.

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