Prepare now for slow Internet speeds and dropped mobile phone calls. Some customers report that their remote workers experience slow Internet speeds. The sheer number of people working from home, and others watching videos at home, is causing the Internet to experience slowdowns similar to traffic during rush hour.

You may have heard that Netflix agreed to reduce the picture quality of movies in the UK to reduce the load on the Internet. What’s that have to do with your company? Prepare a contingency plan now. Something easy to change is to instruct your workers to ask their family members to please download their movies at night rather than streaming the videos during work hours. That way, their family can watch their downloaded movies during the daytime without using up your workers’ remote network speed.

If your remote workers use VPN connections, and they experience slow speeds, your IT team can enable something called split tunneling. Then, if they aren’t already, your workers’ computers take a shortcut directly to the Internet without going a long way around through your primary office location’s firewall first. That trades speed for security, so executives have to make the decision, but the change might be worth it if your workers cannot work otherwise. There are other strategies too. Know that recorded video and audio conference calls will make it through even when a real-time conference is so slow it fails.

Other customers explain that the cellular towers in their area are so overloaded that phone calls get dropped, and voices are sometimes garbled beyond understandability. That’s when text messages, though less convenient, will be your plan B. At least text messages will usually go through even with weak or slow connections.

Please forward this message to your friends so they can have a plan in place at their company in case an Internet or cell phone traffic jam interferes with their business.