Is your business network holding you back? Learn the five warning signs that indicate your switches, cabling, or wireless network need professional attention before they cause costly downtime.
Most business owners do not think about their network infrastructure until something breaks. But network problems rarely appear overnight. They build gradually — a slow connection here, a dropped video call there, a security camera that intermittently goes offline. By the time these issues become daily frustrations, the underlying infrastructure has often been struggling for months or years.
Here are five warning signs that your business network needs professional attention before a small problem becomes a costly outage.
If employees complain that shared files take forever to open, cloud applications feel sluggish, or video conferences buffer and freeze, the problem often traces back to network bottlenecks rather than internet speed. Common culprits include aging 100 Mbps switches that cannot keep up with modern traffic demands, Cat5 or Cat5e cabling that limits throughput, or switches running at capacity with no room for additional devices.
A network assessment can identify exactly where bottlenecks exist and whether the fix requires switch upgrades, cabling improvements, or both. In many cases, upgrading from unmanaged consumer-grade switches to enterprise Cisco managed switches eliminates performance problems while adding visibility into network traffic patterns.
When certain conference rooms, offices, or warehouse areas consistently have weak or dropped Wi-Fi connections, the wireless network design is the likely issue. Consumer-grade access points positioned based on convenience rather than RF engineering create coverage gaps, interference problems, and capacity limitations that worsen as more devices connect.
A professional RF site survey maps your facility's wireless coverage, identifies dead zones and interference sources, and produces a design that delivers consistent connectivity everywhere your team works. Enterprise access points from Cisco and Verkada support seamless roaming, band steering, and centralized management that consumer equipment simply cannot match.
If your security cameras periodically drop offline, show degraded image quality, or display buffering on playback, the issue is almost always network-related rather than a camera problem. IP cameras are bandwidth-intensive devices — a single 4K camera can consume 15-25 Mbps of continuous upstream bandwidth. When multiple cameras share an underpowered switch or an oversubscribed uplink, the switch drops frames or the cameras automatically reduce resolution to cope.
PoE power delivery is another common failure point. Switches that lack sufficient PoE budget will randomly restart cameras or refuse to power new devices. Upgrading to enterprise PoE++ switches with proper power budgets resolves these issues and provides headroom for future camera additions.
If every device in your building — workstations, phones, cameras, access control readers, guest devices, and IoT sensors — operates on a single flat network, you have both a security vulnerability and a performance problem. A compromised IoT device can reach sensitive file servers. Broadcast traffic from cameras consumes bandwidth that workstations need. Guest devices sit on the same network as financial data.
Proper VLAN segmentation isolates different traffic types onto separate virtual networks. Security cameras get their own VLAN, guest Wi-Fi traffic is isolated from corporate resources, and VoIP phones receive quality-of-service priority to prevent call quality issues. This is a configuration change that requires managed switches — another reason to upgrade from unmanaged consumer equipment.
Network switches, access points, and firewalls have finite lifespans. Equipment older than seven years typically runs outdated firmware that no longer receives security patches, lacks support for current wireless standards and PoE specifications, and cannot be covered by manufacturer support contracts. Running end-of-life network equipment is both a security risk and a reliability gamble.
Planned equipment refreshes are far less expensive and disruptive than emergency replacements after a failure. A network lifecycle assessment identifies equipment that has reached or is approaching end-of-life so you can budget for phased replacements rather than reacting to failures.
If any of these signs sound familiar, your network is telling you it needs attention. Harris Technology Services provides free network infrastructure assessments for businesses throughout Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware. Our Cisco-certified engineers will evaluate your switches, cabling, wireless coverage, and firewall configuration, then deliver a prioritized recommendation plan. Contact HTS at (877) 877-9080 to schedule your assessment.
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