The entire process needs to operate efficiently on a small scale. All businesses try to control costs, but small businesses have less margin for error. Also, a small business cannot take advantage of the economies of scale. For example, a large organization can use one PC to support many remote access phone lines, while a small company needs that same single PC to support just one phone line. Line speed is a crucial issue.
Phone lines are much, much slower for transmitting data than network cables.
This can make remote access tedious and frustrating. While all telecommuters could benefit from faster communications, it is probably most important for the small business user. The best example of this is the differences in implementing database applications. In a large corporation, databases are often configured for client-server use. In simple terms, this means that users only need to work with small subsets of data at a time.