Chances are you worked from home recently.

Whether it’s working out of a home office occasionally or running a “virtual” business headquarters fulltime from a home office, an increasing number of us are doing business over consumer-grade Internet connections — and probably experiencing some degree or another of frustration.

For example, maybe you’d like to cut the Microsoft Office cord and use on-demand office applications. Now, your experience may be different from mine, but I’ve found trying to create or edit a Web-based spreadsheet, for example, was so slow that I could get a cup of coffee between keystrokes. Imagine editing a document with the same response as filling in an online form and you’ll get the picture.

Of course, I’m not the first person to notice this. Broadband service providers have been paying attention and looking for ways to bring business-class connections to the work-at-home masses — and realize heftier profit margins into the bargain.

A while back, Covad, as part of its blogger relations program, made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: a T1 connection to my home office. I’ve been using it for about three months. (More about my experience later).

This got me interested in whether T1 to the home was going to be the Next Big Thing. After all, Covad was one of the first to offer broadband service.

“Covad was a broadband pioneer in the 1990s,” comments Infonetics Research Principal Analyst Stéphane Téral. “They have been on the cutting edge for a long time.”

“There are a lot of Silicon Valley execs worrying that Silicon Valley is losing its edge. In other parts of the world you can get 10 megabits for what you pay for one megabit here. So this is part of saying, ‘We got the message and now we’re doing something about it.’”

The advantage of T1 isn’t strictly speaking speed. Cable download speeds are much faster. The advantage of the T1 is on the upload — 1.5 megabits, twice as fast as DSL and about four times as fast as cable — and guaranteed bandwidth and uptime. Plus, T1 service isn’t distance-sensitive like DSL — something Comcast’s reptilian Slowskys keep reminding us about.

While the price for T1 service has dropped by about 75 percent in the last 15 years, at $300 to $400 a month for entry level service, T1 to the home probably isn’t going to appeal to consumers, other than perhaps the most hardcore gamers.

It’s the business market that providers are aiming for.

“There are something like 11 million small businesses in the U.S. and the majority are fairly small,” explains Jake Soder, Speakeasy’s Director of Product Management. “They don’t have a huge opex budget, but they’re looking for something more than just some Internet bandwidth.

“More and more people are saying, ‘I can’t afford downtime,” he continues, ” and the answer to that is a T1.”

That’s because increasingly the Internet is the basic enabler of business operations, the way the telephone used to be. That brings the dependability of the bandwidth to the fore, and that’s another place where T1 cleans DSL’s and cable’s clocks with service level agreements guaranteeing mean time to repair in minutes and hours instead of hours and days.

“They’ve become more interested with the advent of video, Skype,” says Simon McIver, Covad’s Director of Marketing. “They want a high quality service, [with bandwidth] locked. With DSL, the moment school gets out, the DSL slows down.”

Converged communications and VoIP are other drivers.

“SMBs are prime candidates for the cost-savings of VoIP,” says Speakeasy’s Soder. “When you put a couple of phone calls on 384 kilobits [cable’s upload speed] you’ve started to choked your upload, or you end up with dead spots.”

Other good candidates are businesses with high throughput requirements; for example, law offices sending large PDF files, video and audio production companies, VPNs, hosting websites, and of course, duplicating the desktop experience for those on-demand office applications.

And the potential market is growing beyond the usual suspects.

“We have non-traditional users entering this space that we didn’t see two or three years ago,” reports Covad’s McIver. “Businesses you would normally not expect [to be bandwidth dependent]. Auto body shops have applications where you look up parts and schematics online.” If the system is down, they’re not working.

While prices have come down dramatically, don’t expect to see $24.99-a-month T1 services anytime soon. “Our goal is not to get into the death spiral price war,” says McIver.

Instead, providers are looking to compete with value-added services.

“It’s a platform for managed services and VoIP products,” explains Speakeasy’s Soder. “It continues to be our preferred method for our VoIP product. We’d prefer to have everyone on a T1 to have the guaranteed uptime for phone service.”

“As a broadband provider we can provide value-added applications like security, email, web hosting,” says Covad’s McIver. “At the end of the day it’s not about speed — its consistency and dedicated bandwidth.”

So how is my T1 connection working? Here’s the report so far.

First, I haven’t needed any of the premium service that comes with the premium connection. It’s been a no-brainer from that perspective. Which is good because of item number two: it’s not easy to set up. I had to call out my telecom engineer friend to reconfigure my router to get the whole set-up to work.

The Schuk MMOG lab reports that the performance is “like, incredible” in a series of high throughput tests including Counterstrike and World of Warcraft, conducted daily from about 10:00 p.m. until the wee hours of the morning.

But how are your VoIP calls, you’re asking. Because the online gaming isn’t usually going on when I’m on the phone, there wasn’t a noticeable difference. However, if you’re uploading large files — video or audio, for example — the performance improvement is significant.

Covad is working on the user experience, according to McIver. “Our goal is to make this easy to buy, easy to set up and easy to get support.”

Businesses are looking to get mobile in a big way in the next 12 to 18 months, with 60 percent having or planning a mobility strategy, according to Mokena, IL-based Nemertes Research study.

Unified communications are also high on the corporate shopping list, according to a brand new Infonetics research report. The Campbell, CA-based telecom research firm reports 21 percent growth between 2005 and 2006 for sales of unified communications applications worldwide. Further, Infonetics predicts annual growth to continue “in the high double digits” through 2010. Infonetics also reports that Avaya leads the worldwide unified messaging market in 2006, but Nortel, Cisco, and Alcatel-Lucent are gaining.

Mobio — the people who think that you don’t really want the Web on your phone, just parts of it — now lets you take Twitter, Digg and Kaboodle on the go with three new free, downloadable widgets.

Mobile applications are a natural for health care. And the iPhone is a natural for drawing attention. So Unbound Medical has recently announced that its mobile medical knowledge system now runs on the iPhone. The company has been selling medical applications for handhelds since 2000.

Ucompass is also looking for iPhone strokes for its iPhone-enabled wireless systems for educators.

Avanquest Software’s Mobile PhoneTools will now be bundled with Lenovo’s Bluetooth-enabled notebook PCs, letting any compatible Bluetooth cell phone function as a modem when it’s connected to the laptop. No PCMCIA card or WiFi hot spot needed.

Another way to send voice messages without a phone call from Buzz Interactive.

Yesterday VoIP, Inc. launched the beta of its new communications portal Click4me that lets you make VoIP calls through any browser-enabled mobile device. The portal also offers email, calendaring, and other office applications.

Pre-paid long distance provider OneSuite yesterday debuted its new hybrid VoIP/PSTN service, OS Hybrid. Like the Prius, it lets you keep more green.

Motorola gets closer to an end-to-end portfolio with its acquisition of Leapstone Systems and its content creation, management and delivery platform.

Also looking toward the content delivery game, Level 3 today announced its acquisition of broadband and mobile video management and streaming services Servecast, Ltd.

The Rumor Mill Keeps Grinding: Low-end iPhone in the pipeline? Dream on, says Newsweek’s Thomas Claburn.

Samsung’s convergence calculation goes like this. Routing + switching + VoIP + security = 1 — One box, one management interface, one architecture. Last month the Korean electronics giant introduced the U.S. enterprise networking market to Samsung’s new math with the Ubigate iBG Series all-in-one enterprise networking platform for SMBs.

Ubigate begs the question: does the world really need another box?

That’s a simplistic and narrow view, according to Samsung Director of North American Enterprise Networks Lynn Tinney. Ubigate, Tinney explains, is a foundation for converged communications.

“When you speak to customers, they’re speaking about investments: how can I make network operation more efficient. It’s not like they woke up one morning and wanted convergence. It’s coming more gradually, in terms of wise investment, pushed by [the need for] making end users more productive, getting more for their investment.”

To meet these perennial business objectives, the infrastructure has to be in place to serve up what end users need. But while big companies have many choices in today’s market, SMBs have a limited range of options.

“To reach an SMB market, you have to recognize that you’re putting a lot of functionality on a single box,” says Tinney. “It’s risky on the low end but cost makes it a bad financial decision on the high end.”

In other words, when you have a dominant market player — that would be Cisco, the elephant in this particular room — all solutions entail sizable compromises for customers.

Enter Samsung Ubigate iBG.

“We recognize that in the SMB market Samsung could develop a box that offered some clear advantages,” explains Tinney.

The first place Samsung hopes customers will work the new math is in their costs. To start, Ubigate pricing is about 30 percent less than its “nearest competitor,” according to Tinney. Further, cost of ownership goes down as well, Tinney says, with less equipment and a single, browser-based network management interface. “Business gateways are new corner stones for any infrastructure, Samsung’s Ubigate can consolidate three or four boxes to one.”

Reliability is another part of the calculus that Tinney says makes a convincing argument for the Ubigate.

“Samsung’s long history of outstanding engineering delivers its worth to customers. They can feel confident Samsung brings to market a well engineered and tested solution. The Ubigate is built for redundant power supply to further ensure network reliability,” Tinney says, adding,”If there’s a flaw in it anywhere, it’s that it’s over-engineered.”

Finally, Samsung is also aiming to change the security versus performance equation.

“Security is often the feature that end users either have to sacrifice to maintain performance or accept slower processing speeds to keep the security levels,” explains Tinney. “With Ubigate, the customer can have AV, IDS, IPS, etc. without giving up on performance. Although I doubt the Ubigate will be looked at for only security, this is a critical benefit that goes to significant TCO and ROI.”

Finally, Samsung’s acknowledged expertise in the consumer market will give the Ubigate an additional market advantage, Tinney says.

“Strategic decision makers recognize that the end user is a consumer. Understanding the consumer is an advantage as we design our product. We understand that single user’s perspective.”

So how does that elephant in the room figure in Samsung’s math?

“It’s one thing to go out and buy a tennis racquet,” she says. “It’s another thing to learn how to play.”

As might be expected, even before the Apple iPhone hits retailer shelves, its sexy features are showing up on other handsets. Like visual voicemail. German company SimulScribe just announced a “downloadable visual voicemail application” — SimulSays Beta — for the BlackBerry 8800 series, BlackBerry Pearl, BlackBerry Curve and Windows Mobile. The service normally starts at $10 a month, but the beta is free. However, in its rush to get the news out, SimulScribe appears to have forgotten to put the info on the website.

Dual mode phones just might be crossing the chasm and T-Mobile may be positioning itself for a spot at the head of the pack. This week the company launched the T-Mobile(R) HotSpot @HomeSM service. And coming along for the ride is the Nokia 6086 dual mode phone, also announced today. At home and in hotspots, calls are made over the WiFi network. Leave the hotspot, and calls automatically go through T-Mobile’s GSM/GPRS/EDGE wireless network. The press release lets you infer that the handoff is seamless, but I’m dubious because it doesn’t say it directly.

And speaking of WiFi, Mountain View, CA-based startup WeFi is opening up the beta of its WiFi community. WeFi helps you find and connect to free WiFi hotspots as well as keeping track of keys for locked and for-fee services.

If your idea of meal planning is ordering Chinese takeout, this isn’t for you. But for those of us who have wished we could look up a recipe for an item that’s on sale, Allrecipe.com’s new mobile service is just the ticket. Just type “Mobile.Allrecipes.com” into the phone’s Web browser.

Packet8 is sweetening the pot for customers, especially Virtual Office business customers, with “digital courier service” from YouSendIt.com, that makes it easy to send very large files electronically. It’s designed for files like video that can’t be sent via email, but it also works well for sending photos and large documents. I use it to send audio files of interviews to the archivist at my local library, and can attest to the ease of use.

It had to happen: iPlayboy widget for your Apple iPhone. Now do you want to buy one?

I hardly ever use instant messaging. The reason isn’t a laudable desire to avoid distractions. It’s because I simply forget to open that IM “silo.”

We’re so used to working with applications that operate like silos — email, document editing, instant messaging, media players — that we don’t notice it until someone brings it to our attention.

What’s more, for those of us who have difficulty staying focused in the best of cases, the between-applications shuffle provides endless opportunities for distraction and time wasting. For example, it’s taken me four days to finish this story.

Mill Valley, CA-based IP communications company CommuniGate wants to help me out with its newest offering, Pronto!; a browser-based user interface that brings together e-mail, instant messaging, rich media, RSS feeds, and groupware.

Sold through distributors and service providers, Pronto! can be run by a service provider as a hosted service or on-premises by an enterprise. Business and consumer subscribers can use their Pronto! desktop through any Web browser, anywhere without installing any client software.

What sets the Adobe Flash-based Pronto! apart from other unified communications and office suites is that it brings multi-media into the mix.

The system marries two of today’s hot trends: Rich Internet Applications (RIA) — aka Web 2.0 — and unified IP communications. The interactive nature of the application is important; this is not simply a Web mail program. These applications work just like the ones physically on your desktop, says CommuniGate VP of Business Development Jon Doyle, and they are designed go seamlessly with the workflow.

“If you look at the way people work, they’ll have an email client open, they’ll have a media player open, they might be using a blogging tool or working on a document,” explains Doyle. For example, Pronto! integrates your calendar and your email and lets you drag and drop video from your desktop and publish a video press release seamlessly.

Pronto! is designed for small to mid-size businesses with 20 to 200 users — the kind that don’t have the time or resources to invest in managing an in-house system like Microsoft Communicator. Pronto!’s sweet spot is with small-to-medium size legal, medical and media firms.

It’s an underserved market, according to Doyle.

“With Microsoft you have to have Exchange, Active Directory, Live Communications Server, a PBX, the Office suite,” says Doyle. In other words, lots of software and equipment to install, configure and manage.

“If you look at small companies, they don’t have an IT guy to set up Microsoft or Lotus,” he continues. “They can’t have five or six products to deal with. It might be all right for Delta Dental but not for the dentist down the street. Pronto! is technology ‘baked’ to be useful.”

The system’s secret sauce is Adobe Flash. The first reason is security, according to Doyle.

“Flash is inherently secure because it runs in memory space,” he explains. “Flash is a binary that runs in memory space within the Flash or Shockwave layer, and is far more secure. Java, AJAX, Javascript [other technologies used to build RIAs] open security holes because they can execute exploits, and thus can be used by hackers to get into the PC.

“That’s a big thing for us,” Doyle adds, “because we didn’t want to unleash a whole series of fixes.”

Easy handling for multi-media is another benefit, says Doyle. “Multi-media plays inside Flash. Ajax and Java [other technologies for building RIAs] call up a player,” he explains, “and players are a security hole. Once you let it play, it’s on your PC.”

Finally, with Flash Lite bringing RIAs to handsets, Pronto! gets to go along for the ride. “Over the next 24 months you’re going to see a lot of Flash Lite,” says Doyle. “Providers are starting to look at it for games, data applications. If you start a Java application on a cell phone,” he adds, “it’s not intuitive.”

So what’s next? First up in September will be integrated voice services; either through a CommuniGate plug-in or built in capabilities in the next version of Flash Player. After that, Doyle says, “really creative packages of software — voice messaging, SMS, email, all crafted for special uses.”

Now excuse me, I have to go open my IM program and see if any of my old friends from high school want to chat.