Blew $600 on a managed switch and it barely helped my office network

I dropped $600 on a Netgear managed switch for my small IT consulting office in Midtown, thinking it would fix all my speed issues. Turns out the real bottleneck was a cheap CAT5 cable running to the server room that nobody noticed. Now I have a fancy switch and still need to re-run cabling. Has anyone else found a hidden cable problem that cost them money?

3 comments

3 Comments

lisas781d ago

Honestly I used to scoff at people who blamed cables for network problems. Like come on it's just a wire right? Then I spent two days chasing a weird slowdown in my basement office and it turned out to be a frayed CAT5e that got pinched behind a desk. It was grounding out or something intermittent. Replaced it with a $8 patch cord and everything went from crawling to screaming fast. Now I check EVERY cable first before touching hardware.

the_felix1d ago

Oh man, that reminds me of the time I helped a buddy troubleshoot his home network and we spent three hours swapping out routers and blaming his ISP. Turned out his cat had been chewing on the ethernet cable behind the couch. Little furry gremlin had it half severed and we just never saw it. Felt like a real knucklehead.

the_robin1d ago

Ugh, that's a classic. But actually, a frayed or pinched cable can do way worse than just slow things down. I had one that was barely making contact and it caused packet loss so bad my ping would spike to 2000ms every couple seconds. Replaced it with a basic Cat6 and the problem vanished. So yeah, cables are always the first thing I check now too. They're cheap and dumb, but they break more than you'd think.