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Networking

"The Wi-Fi is slow" is almost never about the Wi-Fi

Five design mistakes we find in nearly every small-business network, and what each one actually costs you.

When a client says the internet is slow, upgrading the circuit fixes it maybe one time in five. The other four times the bottleneck is inside the building, and more bandwidth just makes the invoice bigger.

Consumer gear doing a commercial job

A home router handles a handful of devices. Thirty devices, a few dozen cloud sessions, a VoIP system and a camera recorder will exhaust its connection-tracking table long before the circuit saturates. It doesn't fail loudly — it just gets slow at 10 AM.

One flat network for everything

Guests, cameras, thermostats, printers and the server sharing one broadcast domain is both a performance problem and a security problem. Cameras alone can produce constant multicast traffic that degrades wireless for everyone.

Access points placed by guesswork

Two access points in the ceiling above the same hallway, none over the far corner where three people work. Coverage should come from a survey against the floor plan, not from where the cable already happened to run.

No visibility

Without monitoring, "slow" is an anecdote. With it, we can point at the switch port, the device or the 2 PM backup job that is actually responsible — and fix that instead of guessing.

Nobody owns the firmware

Access points and gateways ship with bugs that get fixed in later releases. Devices running four-year-old firmware inherit every one of those bugs, plus the security holes.

Before you buy more bandwidth, find out whether you're using the bandwidth you already pay for.

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