Most devices that a business uses, it seems, are connected to the network. In this day of… IoT, short for Internet of Things, we find devices like refrigerators, light switches, dishwashers, doorbells, all sorts of things now have internet connections. This means a whole lot of traffic on your network. It means that.
That gigabit pipeline that looks so huge years ago is suddenly starting to show a lot of traffic. It’s starting to show signs of slowness. What can a business owner do to alleviate traffic problems? One thing you can do is segment his network.
The way networking works is that you plug devices into a switch or a router. These devices all agree to speak to each other by the use of IP addresses. Bye! And submit masks. Normally, when you plug things into your network, the devices request IP addresses and the router gives them to them. This usually means that every device in your network can see and communicate with every other device in your network. And most of the time this isn’t a problem.
When you get an extremely large number of devices, it can be a problem. Good night. Thank you. What can you do? Well, you can spring for a router which is capable of creating multiple networks. For example, I have a client who uses devices in the 192.168.1 range. I have recently added a second network for their phones. Their phones use the 192.168.100 range. The phones cannot see the other devices on the network. They can get out to the Internet, however. This means that the phone traffic is completely unaffected by the traffic of file sharing, printing, and the like.
The way it is set up is that I have one port on the router which hands out IP addresses in the 192.168.1 range. I have a second port on the router which hands them out in the 192.168.100 range and. As long as devices are plugged into those two different ports, they won’t see each other. They will be on their own isolated networks.
This is a very simple example. There are other ways that you can segment your devices and get them different IP addresses. One way. Is to use the device’s hardware address and have the router recognize it and hand out a special range of IP addresses based on that hardware range. Another way this can be accomplished is through VLAN tagging. VLANs stand for Virtual LANs. VLANs are something that smart switches can handle. A smart switch can detect a tagged VLAN and keep it isolated from the other VLAN. This is all done magically at the packet level. Different headers in the packets, which are packaged up pieces of information that go over the wires, Contain things like tags, which switches recognize and use to prioritize the traffic of those packets. Segmenting their networks.
We’re talking businesses in the northwest Arkansas area. We’re talking businesses in Bentonville, Rogers, Fayetteville, Springdale, Prairie Grove, Lincoln. I don’t pretend that segmenting networks is a simple matter. Notice network issues is with their voice over IP phones. They’re ignored. This is because there’s simply not enough time in a live phone conversation for you to send dropped packets. Therefore, your phones demand networks face all their own, which is unaffected by any other devices. For this reason, phones do best when they are on their own segmented subnet.
You can spend a thousand dollars on a very nice router. And segment your network. You can also spend $75 on an Edge Router X from Ubiquiti, and it too will segment your networks if you know what you’re doing. Ubiquiti has five switch ports on it. Basic $75 Ubiquiti routers set up with one client will allow for two different internet sources, also two different networks within their business. The internet source picks up so that these people never have to deal with extended internet. If their main internet drops out, they have their other internet pick up and start working within about 10 seconds. Hmm.
So, don’t let expensive equipment prices scare you away from segmenting your network. Instead, put me to work on it and let me see what I can do to come up with a perfect solution for you at a budget price. I understand money is tight and I understand that business owners need to be very careful about making decisions with their network infrastructure, which is, after all, basically overhead, although it’s very necessary overhead.
A reliable network is as important to a business as a competent sales staff. So if you’ve had any problems with devices on your network dropping out or slowing down or even just disappearing, let me take a look at it. Odds are, with a little bit of intelligent networking… Decisions, I can make things better for you. And this will improve your bottom line and your profit margin.