Essential Hardware For Telecommuter

If you work from home either as a telecommuter, or as a small business, or have a small home office there are a few pieces of hardware that will improve your ability to do business from home.

Dual Wan Router
A telecommuter 's ability to work is usually tied to their Internet connection. Consider adding a second Internet connection to your home office from a diverse provider than you currently have. That means if you have a cable modem, get DSL - or vice versa. Then add a dual WAN router from to manage these two connections. Xincom makes a very good dual WAN router that will allow you to load balance the two connections and provide dynamic failover. These means that you can increase your internet speed through load balancing because the two Internet pipes are being used simultaneously. Additionally, if one of them fails, you will still remain up with almost no notice to what you are doing. The one exception will be some VOIP connection will need to manually changed from the failed Internet connection to the one that is up. This is a bit of a pain, but it is better than not being able to do work when you lose your Internet connection. Also, if you have a spouse or children at home, you can segment them off on to their own (DSL or Cable) while you use the other for work. This will prevent someone downloading videos from making your VOIP call choppy or killing your VPN connection.

Boost Your VOIP Quality of Service
If you use VOIP for your home office you should make sure you boost the VOIP Quality of service between you and the Internet. Hawkings Technologies makes the HBB1 Broadband Booster. It is somewhat old, but it will do a better job of insuring that your VOIP connection gets the bandwidth over your other connection (email, VPN, video downloading.) If you have two Internet connection with the dual WAN router mentioned above you this will only boost one of those connections. You would need a second HBB1 to for both to be boosted for VOIP traffice. This device will sit between your router and then Internet.

Network Attached Storage ("NAS") with RAID
Your data is often one of your most valuable assets in business. If you work in a corporate office there is a good chance that you store your important data on a file server that gets backed up by the IT department. Unfortunately, most people who telecommute don't take care of backing up there data from their laptop or computer to a file server at their home office. This can be done by either choosing an offsite backup solution such as Mozy.com or many others out there in this space or by having a n external hard drive. There are advantages and disadvantages to both and nothing that says you can't do both with all or part of your data. While offsite data backups will protect your data from a disaster such as fire that could possibly destroy your primary data location (PC or laptop) and your secondary external hard drive, these sites aren't any good if they go out of business, your Internet is down, or if you have to pay too much to backup all the data you want saved. These issues can be resolved by storing the data on an external hard drive at home. The inexpensive solution is to buy a USB of Firewire attached external drive that has built in syncing software. These will do the trick for most people, but our recommendation is to get a network attached storage device with RAID. You can then set up you home office router to allow you to access the data from home or elsewhere. Also, you can have multiple users save to this drive from your home office - perhaps you have a partner that works with you from your home office, now you can each have your own private space to store information on a file server as well as a space that you share files over the network without requiring both PC's or laptops to be on at the same time. Key to choosing a network attached storage device is to buy one with RAID technology. RAID means that there are two or more hard drives in the device so that your data is backed up to separate drives to prevent data loss if one drive has a hardware failure. This does happen and when it does you'll be glad you had RAID!

If you find these hardware recommendations helpful then you will enjoy other recommendations and further explanations of how to be successful at telecommuting at www.HomeRunOffices.com

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