Yes, you can work from home with satellite internet. It depends on what you want to be doing when you work at home for which plan you pick. When deciding on a plan to choose you need to think of what you want your speed and data cap should be for what you are doing. A download speed of 25 Mbps is on the lower end of what is recommended for what working at home. It takes 25 Mbps to stream a show on Netflix at highest quality, so if you have that on in the background to work then you won't have any speed to do anything else besides read a few emails. A plan with about 100 Mbps is considered fast internet and is recommended for working at home because you can have video conference calls, a show on in the background for you or your kids and you can surf the web or check your email all day long. Viasat is a satellite internet provider and has four different plans between 25 Mbps and 100 Mbps to choose from. The plans have a data cap of 60 GB, 100 GB, 100 GB, and 150 GB which is plenty for most people when working from home. These are just a few options when looking for satellite internet for working from home and are similar to what you will find at other satellite internet providers. These plans will supply you with the necessary speed and data for whatever you need to do.

Working from Home WFH with Viasat Satellite Internet

Many employers now let you work from home at least one day a week if your job fits that model. Even if you work “in the field” chances are you are going to have work-related online time at home during the week. You can do this with Viasat but there are some dependencies around whether your employer’s VPN is cloud based or route-based.

VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, help secure communications from outside intruders. Whether The VPN will seriously slow down your satellite internet speed depends on what type of VPN your company uses. VPNs that are based in the cloud like Google Docs, Microsoft 365, Dropbox and others, are fairly easy to work with and won’t slow you down too much on a satellite connection. But if your employer set up a proprietary VPN using private routes or tunnels for data flow then your speeds with satellite internet can be reduced by as much as 50% or even more, making use of the VPN challenging, especially for online conference calls.

It’s a general rule with satellite internet data caps to turn off your camera where appropriate to reduce the amount of data you are using. Cameras use exponentially more data. It all depends on the nature of your work. Some teams are perfectly at ease being off camera during the meeting while others require you to appear on-camera throughout the entire meeting. Being on camera in a meeting is more stressful for employees because you are “in the spotlight” but not getting any feedback from the body language of others. It’s very tricky to read the room in an online call. And as stated it uses much more data than being off-camera. With camera off you can definitely do an online call with Viasat Satellite Internet and not use large amounts of data. If you are downloading a file during the call then you will be using more data to perform the download.

Always check your My Viasat app to see how much high-speed data you’ve used for the month so that you don’t exceed the soft cap and experience slower speeds.

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