Shoutout to the tech who finally fixed my latency after 4 months of tickets

I run a small MSP out of a co-working space in downtown Denver, and for four months our main fiber link had random latency spikes every evening around 6 PM. I must have opened fifteen tickets with the carrier, and each time they'd run tests, say everything looked fine, and close it out. Finally last week a field tech actually came onsite and found a bad patch cable in the main distribution frame that was causing intermittent errors. He swapped it out in like five minutes and our pings dropped from 200ms to 15ms instantly. Has anyone else had a problem drag on for way too long because the remote diagnostics showed nothing wrong?

2 comments

2 Comments

benwilliams5d ago

Had a similar issue a few years back with a client's internet that kept dropping at random times. Spent months swapping equipment and running traceroutes only to find out it was a loose coax connector in the ceiling that a squirrel had chewed on. Felt like a total idiot when we finally saw it, but hey, at least the squirrel was having a solid evening watching Netflix I guess. Remote diagnostics are great until they make you look like you don't know what you're doing for four months straight.

wendy_garcia165d ago

Oh man, this hits so close to home. We had a client whose VPN would just die every day at 2:30 PM like clockwork for weeks. We replaced their router, their firewall, their switch, even ran new cables to their desk. Finally I got frustrated and sat there at 2:15 watching the logs like a hawk. Turned out the janitor was plugging a floor buffer into the same power strip as their network gear. Every time he hit the switch the voltage dip would reset the modem. I felt like such a clown after all that hardware swapping. Remote diagnostics never would have caught that because it looked like a clean disconnect every time. Sometimes you just gotta be there when it breaks.