Client Profiles

CNS Fixes Slow Network for a Non-Profit with a Simple Solution

A large national non-profit organization headquartered in Gaithersburg, MD has recently experienced rapid growth, and expanded its offices into another floor in its building. Moving employees to the new floor happened slowly, just a few at a time, until all of the sudden, the new floor housed just as many staff as the first floor. The only problem was that the users on the new floor suffered horrible performance delays when accessing server resources and the Internet. It would sometimes take up to 90 seconds to open a basic Microsoft Word document! After weeks of suffering, someone finally spoke up and complained to the right person.

Enter Corporate Network Services. After hearing about and seeing these problems first hand, CNS completed a full scale network evaluation and discovered that the issue was related to the network infrastructure. It seems that the over 150 users on the first floor were connected to five different switches. For all of these switches, there was only one single 100BaseT connection going to the first floor. In layman’s terms, there was only a single lane open on the beltway during rush hour.

CNS recommended that new Cat 6 tie cables between the floors be installed to allow each switch to connect to backbone at 1000BaseT through its own cable. This would allow for a much faster connection between users and resources. Basically, we built a 50 lane beltway. The result? Users are now operating at peak efficiency and that simple Word document opens almost immediately! The best part of this story is that CNS was able to help resolve this seemingly major issue with very inexpensive option of installing a few tie cables – allowing the non-profit organization to spend money on achieving its mission.