I work for a small company and we outsource our IT management. Our network runs very slowly and we have a terrible internet connection that the IT company blame on our out going emails which doesn’t seem to be the case as we have tried not sending large emails for an afternoon with no benefit felt (I’m talking about emails of 5-6mb).

I think they are taking us for a bit of a ride when it comes to technical support / maintenance and I would like to get someone independant to investigate how well our IT system is run. I know it may not be the IT company that is too blame as someone in the office may be downloading large files without our knowledge but the IT company doesn’t seem to be interested in finding out whether this is the case.

Has anybody had any similar experiences? Could anyone recommend a company that could file a report on our system and its usage?

Thanks

Where are you based?

Ask them to provide network graphs and graphs of various different types of traffic so you can see if there’s a peak. One of our offices had a similar issue which they all chalked down to “peak time usage” with emails, browsing, phone calls (VOIP) etc but when we got some network expertise on it, it was just a shonky bit of connectivity at the upstream providers end.

In short, ask for proof.

The difficulty will be identifying the bottleneck.

It will depend on a whole host of things.
Using basic free tools you will be able to monitor your internet performance however you need to seperate this from your “network” performance.
Do you experience poor local file sharing performance maybe from local hosts or is it just internet performance?

What technologies are you using? simple SDSL/ADSL? any VPN’s? what bandwidth do you have and what contention ratios are you aware of?

You outsource it. Tell them to fix the problem or you’ll cancel the contract.

What sort of link do you have and how many people share it?

I’m based in central London and we have about 10 employees. I’m told we have a 1mb broadband connection with no wireless connectivity or VOIP.

The main issues are:

The entire system freezes a couple of times a day for about 30 seconds (no one can access anything on their terminal)

The internet can become painfully slow

Emails sometimes don’t come through for a couple of hours and then we get a large number in one go

Do you have access to your routers and swithces or is it a fully managed service that they are providing? If so what SLA have you got with them?

I’m based in central London and we have about 10 employees. I’m told we have a 1mb broadband connection with no wireless connectivity or VOIP.

Then you will likely have lots of options for fast SDSL which should give higher speeds.

The entire system freezes a couple of times a day for about 30 seconds (no one can access anything on their terminal)

Then it is less likely to be as a result of your internet connection, depending on what services you have locally.

The internet can become painfully slow

At certain times of the day? This is likely down to contention however if you a sending large mail (particulalrly if they are batched) then this may cause intermittent speed issues.

Emails sometimes don’t come through for a couple of hours and then we get a large number in one go

That may be normal if you are polling an external provider or gateway at pre set times.

Ok thanks Surfer.

Could you recommend anyone that could investigate our issues?

Thanks

I’m sorry I’m based in the North West and i dont have any contacts in London (other than some very expensive suppliers!)

You outsource it. Tell them to fix the problem or you’ll cancel the contract

You outsource it. Tell them you need them to isolate the cause of the bottleneck.

I don’t know the scope of your IT cover but the actual cause may be beyond their remit. But they should be making an effort to assist in isolating the problem.

There will likely be a simple explanation, but like I said the cause may be beyond the scope of what you currently pay them for but by the sounds of it your IT provider are either dragging their feet or not communicating properly.

If you have 1mb ADSL in London, you should be able to have your ISP up it to 8mb (nominally) without any problem at all.. I get 8Mb at home if the sticks. Bear in mind this 1Mb, if its ADSL, will only probably get 256kbps up the pipe, so big attachments etc. being sent may well stall things for a while. If you have a ‘proper’ connection of 1Mb each, you will almost certainly have an SLT with your supplier who should be able to syupply you with nice graphs of usage. Else, therte are plenty of broadband suppliers – plus.net have been very good for me for over 10 years.

However, my blind guess would be that the problem is more likely that you’re running Microsoft Small Business Server – which sticks AD, Exchange,ISA,DHCP,DNS and MS-SQL on one usually underpowered server. This box will be handling your email and proxying your internet access most likely, so if it’s suffering you’d notice – is file serving a little sluggish too? Printing? Have you only got a single server? Or none at all, in which case this is all hot air 🙂

If this is the case, I’d say you’d want a minimum of 4Gb of RAM in the server before you even look anywhere else – shouldn’t be too expensive. I’ve seen plenty of installations with 1 Gb on SATA hard drives, and frankly I’m surprised they boot up let alone work.

There could be many reasons why something could be going slow like that – try ITLab in London (itlab.co.uk) they’re not the cheapest but the quality and commitment to service is very good. (I use their IT Manager Support service)