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Almost Two-Thirds of US Workforce Must Work From Home, Many with Crap Internet

There's about 10 million new or continuing WFH Americans who are trying to function with internet problems or horrible cellular signals. Thankfully, 50 percent of them are regularly disinfecting their phones.

Eric Griffith
 & Eric Griffith Senior Editor, Features

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The Coronavirus crisis hasn't done anyone any favors, except maybe to introduce a large number of the (remaining) workforce in the United States to the wonders of remote work. Of people still with jobs, 57.1 percent are apparently are doing them at home, according to a Waveform survey conduced on March 30, 2020—about 2 weeks, give or take, into shelter-at-home orders in many states.

It looks like the younger you are, the better the chance you had to start this WFH phase of your employment.


18 to 44 Year Olds

The big question for employers is probably this: Is more or less work getting accomplished? The honesty of the responses make it look like about one-third think they're doing a little less. But a quarter of people are doing even more.


Are You Getting More Work Done?

Maybe the most surprising stat from the survey is that only about half of the newly minted telecommuters wish their WFH status was permanent. (A couple of weeks ago, research from Buffer.com indicated that 98 percent of people who had tried working from home pre-COVID-19 wanted that situation to be permanent.)


How to you like working from home?

Waveform used to be called RepeaterStore but changed its name to better reflect the changes in the world since its founding. But it still sells repeaters and signal boosters and noticed an uptick in sales. So it asked people how they felt about their cellular signal at home. About 12 percent think their wireless isn't up to snuff, especially because many people want to use that wireless mobile connection to replace their broadband.


How is the cell phone signal in your home?

Why? Because even more of them, 15.5 percent, have major connectivity issues with their ISP on a daily basis.


how often do you have ISP issues?

Okay, maybe one more "good" thing to come from the quarantine: Almost 50 percent of respondents say they're cleaning their cellphones either daily or, at the very least, every time they return home from going out. 

Related


how often do you disinfect?

The 15.8 percent of you who admit to never having disinfected your phone at all, please identify yourselves so we never, ever shake hands.

For more, read the full report over at Waveform.

Further Reading

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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