WFH: Measuring and fixing latency congestion and slow problems

Sat Mar 14 18:54:38 UTC 2020

Trying to put together a one-pager to help I.T. people at organizations 
with a surge of work from home users.

First, I get that ISPs customer care centers and network operation centers 
are trying their best.  And may be having their own staffing issues. 
Snow days and hurricanes aren't nationwide (at least for the USA). No 
specific ISPs, but generally these users are connected to the major 
corporate and residential ISPs.

Looking for construction suggestions, besides complaining to the ISP 
customer care centers.

Hearing about Work From Home experiences the last couple of days from a 
few dozen large organizations.  The most common complaint is the dreaded 
indeterminate "Its slow."  Heard complaints about both cloud applications 
and classic corporate VPN access.  Most of the users are non-technical 
professionals, e.g. lawyers, business people, etc. with better than 
average residential broadband services (50Mbps to 150Mbps coax, vdsl, 
fios, etc).  But not extreme broadband (not 1Gbps fiber).

What suggestions for diagnosing "slow" complaints with

Classic corporate VPN

Online business apps (brand names as examples)

Google Docs and Sheets
Office365 Outlook and Word

What things can users and I.T. people check first?

How to figure out which provider to complain too?  And rule out providers 
that aren't the problem.