Good evening all,
I have a question for the group. I have been asked to help a local community group rectify network slowness in their main office. I have walked through the facility and I think I have determined possible causes and solutions.
Currently they have 15 wired clients throughout the office space working on a mixture of CAT5 and 5E wiring. Unfortunately since the building is older they do not have direct runs to a majority of the clients. Their ISP modem and 10/100 SonicWALL router are on the north end of the building and their main gigabit switch (S-1) is on the south end. The modem goes through the SonicWALL and into a CAT5 patch panel across the building and into the switch. From the switch it goes into another CAT5 patch panel and out to the clients, some lines are direct and others go to an 8 port 10/100 mini-switch (which is mostly used to make the run longer). Once in the office, the line runs to their phone and then to the client.
Due to a limited budget, my thoughts were to: leave existing setup for their IP based phones and setting up and new network for data. Would start by replacing the SonicWALL with a 10/100/1000 firewall (thinking ZyXEL’s USG50?), leave the CAT5 patch panel in place for the existing phones on north end of the building, add a 24 port Gigabit Switch (S-2) for data on this part of the building and add another gigabit switch (S-3) on the south end for the data runs on that side. From S-2 run 1 new CAT6 run to S-3. That would be for the data runs on the south end. From S-3 run new CAT 6 cabling to each client, thus creating 2 separate networks, 1 for telephone (10/100) and 1 for data (gigabit). **See Attached pdf file for a rough drawing**
I am open to any ideas / thoughts, just be gentle as I’m a novice. My reasoning to leave the Tel-Com separate was to spare the cost of having the company coming in to reconfigure the system.