Structured Cable Systems
Nothing can bring a network to its knees faster than a poor cabling installation. When a cabling system doesn't resemble art work, then it isn't done properly and could cost the owner a lot of money over time.
Just because the computers connect and transfer data, does not mean the
network is not causing problems and lost money. In today's high speed
networks cabling must be perfect to prevent spurious errors from
corrupting data packets. Often the user is not aware of these problems
because network transmission protocols are now very robust and will
retransmit lost and corrupted data automatically. But these constant
re-transmissions create additional loads on the network media causing the
general effects of slowness and congestion. The money lost while
employees wait due to slow network response would probably be enough to repay the
national debt. Unfortunately there is no good way to calculate the
actual financial losses in a given network. Our recommendation is DO IT RIGHT, DO
IT ONCE. At Bytewiser we provide state of the art cabling solutions for
the small to medium size business. Whether your LAN requires 10/100 Mb/s,
Gigabit or Fiber Optic, we can deliver.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| If your data closet looks like this, | we can help. Yes it's the same one! | |
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The numbers in this document are circa 2000.
So what was the cost? This network was installed by a licensed electrician a little less than a year before we replaced it. It was a heavily utilized network with approx. 100 users who accessed several database servers to create customer files, order files, accounting ledgers and so forth. Since they were working in real time taking phone orders and entering data, the network was constantly in use during business hours. Let's play with some hypothetical numbers. I have no idea what the customer paid for this original cabling job, but let's say it was $5000.00. Cheap I know, but let's assume he got a "deal". Let's also assume the average worker in this office made $10.00 per hour. (I'm trying to be conservative here). That would actually cost the owner about $13.00 per hour with taxes, benefits and such, probably more. This network was severely congested, with slow logons, slow file transfers, generally slow response. There were frequent outages due to cabling problems where one or more stations were affected. After the re-cabling, we were told by the network administrator that the network was running about twice as fast with no down time for cable issues. Bear in mind that we installed no new electronic devices, although we did re-configure some of them a little. I believe if we are very conservative, we can assume that each employee probably lost at least a half hour a day, but probably much more. Let's use a half hour. That's .5 hours x 5 days x 50 weeks x 100 employees x $13 = $162,500.00 + the original $5000.00 to do the job + roughly 25 to 50 % of the network administrator's time chasing problems that should never have been. The last time I checked, network administrators made considerably more than $10.00 an hour. Needless to say, I think we can very safely assume that this company lost at least $175,000.00 within one year. If you don't think so, I'd like to hear your logic on the problem. Poorly implemented networks are very very expensive.
Is your company's network meeting your needs for the right price? Get a
free network audit and find out!