Working From Home? Top 5 Tips For Home Office Broadband

As homeworking becomes increasingly popular the importance of having a reliable home office broadband connection steadily rises. Here are our top five handy tips to help you when you’re choosing an internet connection to boost your productivity when working from your home office.

1. Dedicated Business Lines

The main advantage of using a broadband package specifically designed for home workers is that it will be classed as a business package by your broadband provider. Whilst this means that you may pay a little more, you open yourself up to a range of services not normally available to home broadband users.

For example, some fibre based home office broadband packages offer fall back on to normal ADSL if your main connection suffers any outages.

2. Network Priority 24/7

The majority of home broadband connections will fall prey to the dreaded peak time performance drop off’s when the majority of users are online and traffic management policies kick in. This can seriously hamper performance of vital tools for business, as well as hamper your efforts to get things done.

Broadband packages designed specifically for the home office will often have their traffic prioritized over standard home packages, ensuring that businesses and home workers don’t get stuck in the slow lane.

3. Combine Broadband and Business Phone

If you have or are in need of a dedicated business phone then you may well be able to save a fair chunk of cash by combining your home office broadband and calls into a bundle.

TalkTalk is one such provider, giving users of its Homeworker broadband package unlimited calls for an extra £6 per month.

4. A Static Address

A static IP address is often thrown in for free with home office broadband packages. A static IP will let you set up your own email server or host your own website.

Demon Internet’s Home Office 2+ broadband package offers customers a free static IP address.

5. Dedicated Business Support

If a fault does occur, people using broadband designed for home workers or business will often have to wait a much shorter time for it to be repaired.

BT, for example, offer a maximum 4 hours to fix a fault service for business users. Home broadband users would be lucky to have a fault seen in 4 days.

Guest Author: This is a guest article by Neil Hawkins who is a contributing editor Chooseisp, a site to compare broadband deals in the UK which includes guides to help users find mobile broadband for iPad.