There are many reasons why you may be having connectivity issues with devices across your network and the internet. Let us share with you 5 of the most common causes that we have seen in the field.
1. Poor Wi-Fi signal.
It’s hard to know when you have a good Wi-Fi signal. Many of our devices nowadays do not give an accurate representation of our true signal. Both over cellular connection and Wi-Fi connection. In our experience, if you are missing even one bar from your Wi-Fi icon on your computer or phone, there is a good chance that you are going to experience intermittent connection loss and lag.
To fix this, you can often implement Mesh Wi-Fi systems throughout your home or an access point system throughout your place of business to make sure that every square inch of your building has the best Wi-Fi signal possible.
2. Damaged ethernet cable and terminations.
Many times, network issues are caused by the physical infrastructure of your internal network. Such as the ethernet cables and their terminations.
Sometimes there is a break in the cable. Sometimes wires and terminations on the cable are not properly punched down. If you have a good wire tester, such as the Noyafa PP1888 NF-388, you can quickly diagnose if there is a break in the wire or a bad termination somewhere.
Related to that, there has been a silent but deadly push by some sellers of ethernet cables to start selling CCA (copper clad aluminum) ethernet cable. Due to it’s 60% higher resistance, it will create network quality issues at best and is a fire hazard at worst.
Sometimes it’s hard to spot this counterfeit cable when shopping online. There are 3 ways to spot it when shopping:
- I. If the price is significantly cheaper than some of the other options, it is likely CCA ethernet cable.
- II. Sometimes the seller will subtly put CCA or copper clad aluminum somewhere down in the description.
- III. CCA cable cannot be ETL certified and is not TIA compliant. The absence of these qualifications in the description may be an indicator of CCA cable.
Don’t be fooled. This is one of the worst things that you can use in your network! The cost in lost productivity and network issues will FAR EXCEED what you could ever imagine to save from the initial purchase.
3. Dropped data from your internet service provider.
There is a good reason why most people don’t like cable companies. Many of them are riddled with issues. And not just their customer service.
We have worked with ISP’s (internet service providers) again and again over dropped internet connections. Sometimes the issue is the infrastructure within your home or business, but many times it’s the modem or the connection leading to the modem from the outside.
A good basic testing method that anyone can do is to run a continuous ping to a website such as Google by typing the following command into Command Prompt within Windows “ping google.com -t” or for Mac, using terminal “ping google.com”. Once you have allowed sufficient time for the test to run, press “Cmd + C”. This will stop the test and show the following results:
What you are looking for is a constant ping response in ms (milliseconds). And a low packet loss (0% is preferred).
You may need to let this test run for a while to get accurate results.
There are also appliances that you can use on your network that will constantly monitor this metric. Reach out if you have any questions around this. We would be happy to help!
4. Multiple routers.
Something that we have seen over and over again is people using multiple routers on their network.
This is an issue for two reasons:
- I. You have multiple devices handing out IP addresses which will create IP conflicts.
- II. It will block devices from being able to reach each other on the network. This is due to the routers having built in firewalls. This is important if you have cameras, printers, network attached storage devices, and etc.
5. Not using fixed IP’s for devices like printers.
When computers need to regularly connect to other devices on the network (such as printers or servers) it is important to assign a fixed IP address to those devices.
This is because of something called DHCP lease. Which simply means that each device has an IP address assigned to it for a specific amount of time and once that time is up, your router may assign that device a new IP address. When this happens, any device that was connecting to that device before may lose its connection. Especially if the two devices are trying to connect by IP address and not by device name.
We hope that these tips will be of value to you! If you have any questions about your network or if you would like to hire us to take care of your network for you, please reach out to us at Support@VictoryTechnology.com or call us at 865-888-9942.
Thank you!
-Victory Technology Team