It’s the first major snow of the year and a lot of people have decided to stay home and work remotely rather than venture in to the office. And who can blame them to be honest?
The information age and the Internet age that we are living in allows a lot of people that flexibility. So when the bad weather hits they can just fire up the VPN and work from home.
Of course that can present issues to ISPs as they see large volumes of extra traffic on their networks. Below is our graph of “Remote Access” traffic which includes VPN applications, Remote Desktop, SSH, VNC and traffic like that.
As you can see there’s about double the normal amount of Remote Access traffic to normal today (we’re seeing slightly higher amounts of HTTP as well).
This is something we always have on our radar and if necessary can make changes on the fly to our traffic management systems to be able to cope with higher than normal levels of certain types of traffic like this. Fortunately today we’ve only had to make a couple of small tweaks but we will be monitoring both the weather and traffic on the network very closely while there’s still snow in case we need to switch the configuration on the traffic management systems.
Dave Tomlinson
Plusnet Product Team
This entry was posted by Dave Tomlinson on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 6:06 pm and is tagged with Traffic Management and is posted in the category Traffic Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[...] Well it’s been a lonely day on the Products desk today. By lonely I mean empty. The weather has certainly had an effect. Took me 3 and half hours to get home yesterday, a journey that normally takes about 25 - 30 minutes. My trip computer said I averaged 3mph, so there’s been no point in spending probably even more hours getting to and from the office today. Similar story for Maria and looking at our traffic graphs lots of our customers too. http://community.plus.net/blog/2009/02/02/its-snowing-time-to-work-from-home/ [...]
[...] Tomlinson, from the ISP’s product team, wrote a blog on Monday saying that PlusNet’s remote-access traffic doubled, with a slight increase in standard HTTP [...]
But lot of people are cheating like selling their package labeled 'Work from home', but it didn't say anything to start work instead except just worthless tips which we know already or as I say now.
[...] data showing that the amount of VPN and other associated traffic on their network on Monday was double what it usually is, reflecting the amount of remote working taking place. While the FSB estimated that UK business [...]
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