What if you work from home and have no Wifi?

[Honeysucklelane]

We both work from home, DH’s work has an office he goes to once or twice a week. My work has no office and we’re all remote.

Our Wifi has gone down, DH is provided with a work mobile so he’s been able to hotspot to it to do work today. We can’t both use his hotspot.

I haven’t got a work mobile or any way of connecting to Wifi for work tomorrow - unless I go out and spend money sitting in a cafe or somewhere with Wifi.

Just curious to know what other home based workers do in this situation? Do your employers expect you to find alternative Wifi? Do they accept you can’t work through no fault of your own? Does your employer provide or pay for Wifi for you?

Why can't you share DH's hotspot?

It’s his work mobile paid for by work, we’ve tried to both use it before, but two people hotspotting off it slowed it down for him. As it’s a work phone, he understandably gets priority.

I would hotspot off my mobile or use the Reef app and go to a free co-working space

Why can't you both use his hotspot?

I borrow my neighbours. And they borrow mine if theirs goes down. We both have guest networks as well as password protected ones.

I have the same giffgaff tariff and when we moved house we didn't have broadband set up for a couple of weeks, so I used my personal data, and it didn't really eat through that much. Although I guess if you are a graphic designer sending large images multiple times a day it would.

I would rather spend a couple of £ on data than have to take an unplanned day's holiday or unpaid leave.

usually the phone should allow multiple connections as friend at times lets me use theres when traveling and i believe 8 people can connect at once

Do you claim WFH allowance ?
I mentioned this to my daughter who does on call eves/weekends at home as part of her job and wasn't claiming it. Her colleague, same scenario, got 4 years backdated !

It happened to me when we were switching internet providers. I went next door and used theirs.

I have a fully remote team, if this happened in the short term I'd let them work the time back. In the longer term it'a holiday/unpaid leave until it's fixed - it's their responsibility to maintain a connection if they're homeworkers.

Also - it has to be a secure network so no cafe working.

It’s in my contract to have reliable wifi. We can thether to our work phones if necessary. Why don’t you just use your husband’s hot spot?

Same. If I couldn't do that then I'd be expected to work on site. If I didn't then I wouldn't be paid.

I haven’t got a work phone - except for my desk phone which works through the Wifi. We’ve tried both using his hotspot and it slowed things down for him using his VPN etc.

I find this baffling. What is the employee meant to do if their wifi goes down?How can it be their responsibility to maintain a connection? I just think that’s outrageous. It’s completely the reverse where I work. The company accepts that from time to time employees might have connection issues. The company absorbed that into their planning when it made all staff homeworkers. The employees use their home WiFi that they themselves pay for. The company is onto a good thing here. The employee has to contact their provider and see what is happening, when the issue will be fixed. Then we just wait. There’s nothing else we can do.

My team are contractors on a day rate so it's probably a bit different as it's in the contract they need to provide their own laptop and have wifi.

When we were having work done on our house someone cut through the WiFi cable. I headed to the nearest office and arranged for it to be sorted by the next day.

Sorry, @Underlig My team are contractors on a day rate so it's probably a bit different as it's in the contract they need to provide their own laptop and have WiFi.

Although I am interested in what your employers do if you're permanent and salaried and can't work for an extended period of time. Do they just pay you anyway?

We are permanent and salaried. I don’t know the longest anyone has not been able to work. For me, it’s been two days. For others, it’s definitely been longer. Often some of those big provider failures affect multiple staff at the same time, so no one can work. There’s no office we can go to. Offices were closed when home working was introduced. I would fully expect the company to pay staff throughout. The company saved a lot of money by not having offices to run, and this is a small price to pay.

I use my personal phone to hotspot or go to my parents.

@Underlig thanks, that's interesting. Obviously my team have signed a contract saying they are responsible for having the connection so while I'm as flexible as I can be, I can't pay them their day rate for days on end when they can't work. I have a hybrid contract so if/when that happens to me I'd be expected to do extra days in the office, and also make up the time. It sounds like you have a relatively good deal if you don't have to make up time but as you say it's their choice not to offer any office space at all.

When our Wi-Fi went down due to some maintenence work, our broadband provider gave us unlimited data for 1 month for free.

Might be worth contacting your broadband company and see if they can offer anything like that.

I use giff gaff. An extra £20 or so will get you unlimited data as a one off.

in that case thats understandable, i sometimes use the local supermarket cafe wifi, but thats general research, at a guess theres the library but sounds etc

I’m on a temporary salaried contract. They used to have an office years ago, but now everyone WFH. The internet is back up now, interesting to see how different people manage. Also seems not many companies provide an alternative or contribute towards Wifi costs.