10. 9. 2023 | ← Back to blog
Moving part of working life to the flat or home office has become a permanent reality for many people in Prague. This brought new demands on the connection, and it turned out that the tariff which easily handled evening streaming suddenly falls short for a workday full of video calls and access to company systems.
It depends on what exactly you are doing. General figures look like this:
Video calls - one HD call (Teams, Zoom, Meet) consumes approximately 1.5-4 Mb/s in each direction. If you are participating in calls with multiple participants or sharing your screen, allow for 5-8 Mb/s on upload. When two people at home are on video calls simultaneously, you need a reliable 15-20 Mb/s upload, not just download.
Cloud applications - OneDrive, SharePoint, Google Drive or Dropbox continuously synchronise files in the background. Every change to a document is uploaded immediately. The total upload volume can be unexpectedly high, especially when working with graphics, videos or large databases.
VPN connection - A corporate VPN tunnels all traffic through the company server. Actual speed depends on this server's throughput, but the more bandwidth you have available on your connection, the less the VPN slows things down. Symmetrical connectivity is key here: a slow upload will also slow down what appears to be a download over the VPN.
As a minimum comfort level for one person working from home, we recommend 50 Mb/s symmetrically. For a household where two people work or where children are studying at the same time, a reasonable standard is 100-200 Mb/s.
A tariff with a speed of 500 Mb/s is worthless if the connection drops for two minutes every morning or falls to one-tenth of the advertised value in the evening. For home office, stability is more important than the maximum numerical figure in the advertisement.
Optical connection via our own infrastructure, such as our network in Prague 1It does not suffer from the shared bandwidth issue that plagues cable connections. The fibre line is unaffected by the number of active neighbours, your call will run just as smoothly on a Wednesday morning as it will on a Friday afternoon.
The vast majority of domestic tariffs for cable or mobile internet are significantly asymmetric, download may be 200 Mb/s, while upload is only 10-20 Mb/s. This is sufficient for content consumption, but inadequate for home office use.
Every video call, every file sent to a colleague, every backup to the company server, all of this is upload. If the upload is overloaded, video calls freeze, file uploads take forever and the VPN behaves like a brake pad.
Symmetrical optical connection we offer households in Prague 1, this eliminates the problem. 100 Mb/s symmetric means 100 Mb/s download and upload, always.
Fast street-side connection is insufficient if you slow it down inside the flat. A few recommendations that work:
Prefer a wired computer connection. WiFi is convenient, but a direct cable (Ethernet) to the router eliminates the source of fluctuations that are otherwise difficult to diagnose.
Place the router centrally. Walls, especially older brick walls in Prague buildings, significantly attenuate the WiFi signal. If you work in a room other than where the router is located, consider a WiFi extender or a mesh network system.
Separate business and personal use. If the router supports separate networks (VLAN or guest network), it is advisable to keep work devices on a separate network. This prevents situations where a child's tablet streaming YouTube competes with your Teams call for bandwidth.
Verify your actual speed. Regularly test your connection speed, preferably via a cable directly connected to the router. If the measured speed significantly differs from your tariff, contact the provider.
We provide fast and stable internet, fair prices and reliable communication. You can sleep soundly.