If you’re reading this, firstly we hope that you and your family remain in good health through-out this COVID-19 event.

Now for the reason you are here… slow connection speeds or drop-outs to our services. At present quite a number of Australians are working from home and this is congesting networks through-out Australia.

A little (technical) background

For you to reach our infrastructure (be it from the Office or your home), your connection traverses a number of networks and hops across these networks to reach us.

If any of these hops are congested it slows down your experience. As you can also observe the networks have multiple paths (routes) to reach us. Some networks have more paths and more capacity along these paths and nodes. Others do not.

The networks have smarts built into them to work around congested or failed nodes and find a quicker path. However if all nodes are congested due to capacity constraints etc than even the best possible routing algorithms will struggle.

When it comes to the network between our customers and our infrastructure, we unfortunately have no control over the amount of capacity or bandwidth available nor the route used to access our services. Some networks will have more capacity (and in turn less congestion) than others. This is a discussion that customers need to have with their ISPs. They can potentially offer access to better networks with more capacity.

 

So what can you do?

There are a few tweaks you can make to the RDP connection settings. (Prior to doing this make sure that you completely log off the server instance, via Start > Log Off/ Sign-out).

You might be able to increase bandwidth by removing some of the cosmetic settings in RDC under the “Experience” tab.

To access these settings, right click your RDP shortcut and select “Edit”. Then navigate to the “Experience” tab (you may need to select “Show Options” at the bottom of the screen to see the tabs).

 

Select the option “Low speed broadband” from the initial drop-down.
Un-checking any of these settings will lower the amount of content that is travelling to your server, hopefully removing some of the lag in the process:

Once the connection settings have been changed, go back to the “General” tab and select Save As. Save the RDP connection to your desktop with a name such as “Poor Connection – Cloud” Once we are are through the Covid-19 event and networks return to normal, you’ll want to change these settings back.

Although we are a little hamstrung as to how we can address some of these issues, should you wish to discuss other potential options with our team we are here.