Need assistance with your business network? Let me help.
Need assistance with your business network? Let me help.
Hey guys! It's been a hot minute since I've posted here, but I need help/input. I'm currently one of four part time employees that make up the production staff of a smallish (3000 - 4000 members) church in a smallish town in the states. With COVID happening and all, we've spent the past several months upgrading our equipment to prioritize an online audience. These upgrades have included things spanning the AVL spectrum, but one thing that hasn't been touched yet is our "network." To give some background, we've been a church for the past several years, but only moved into a building of our own in the past year (until that point we'd been gathering at hotel conference centers and other venues around town). In order to quickly move into our building, many aspects of our setup were rushed, and we've been paying the price for that while upgrading our old, sub-par equipment - dealing with poorly routed wiring, low quality equipment/fixtures, etc. It's a fun time. Anyway, as we've been upgrading our other equipment, our network (or the lack thereof) has increasingly become a noticeable bottleneck. Additionally, we were approached by the enterprise division of an ISP with an offer to run a fiber connection to our building from a local node and install/manage APs. My interest was piqued, so I've worked with them for the past several weeks until I finally received a proposal from them last week. So, the underlying problem here is we're in desperate need of a network upgrade. However, I don't know whether to attempt to coordinate an upgrade myself or to work with the enterprise ISP (significantly more expensive). I'll provide details of our current setup and the one the ISP proposed below. Currently, we're paying $125/mo. ($250 without discounts) for around 600 Mbps down and 35 Mbps up, plus phone service. The building has two wireless access points - one in the main lobby and one in the main office wing. Both are fed by cat 5e running back into a closet in the auditorium where the coax line to the building is terminated. All three of these locations are marked on the blueprint of the building that I'm attaching to this post. There's also an apple airport (crappy, I know) that sits in our production booth that spans the back of the auditorium (not pictured in the blueprint), and it's what's intended to run an isolated network for our production equipment. It's currently not connected to he public internet. This solution was apparently made with the intention of providing our (at the time) limited staff with internet at those two places in the building, and not much more. Since then, our staff has expanded considerably (I joined back in January), requiring 30-40 people to be on the network at peak times (no, we don't have a guest network), scattered throughout the building. Frankly, I'm surprised the network has held up as well as it has, though there's still plenty of throttling and dropouts, causing delays and headaches. The communication closet isn't much at all. It contains a patch panel with its few working patches running to the office. This isn't used, as the only active pieces of equipment are the modem/router, and a small 5-ish port switch that feeds the APs. I'm limited in what I can say about the ISP's offer, but what I will say is that for around $1.5k/mo for 36 months, plus an installation fee, they'll give us 100 Mbps down and up (scalable up to 10Gbps), 5 static IPs, a managed firewall, and managed wifi. They won't show their plan for the layout of the APs until we sign a contract with them, but they did say they planned on installing 7 of them. I also don't know the specs of the APs they would use. The price also includes various service level agreements that guarantee impressive amounts of uptime, packet loss, jitter, yadda-yadda, as well as guarantees regarding customer service response times and a provided chain of command. I assume this is all geared towards a set-it-and-forget-it type of service, which would take a bit off my plate, sure, but costs a significant amount more than our current plan. In my own mind, a possible upgrade would involve moving the equipment from the communication closet into the booth and installing it on a rack along with our other rack-mountable production gear, buying a legitimate network switch, and adding new access points through the building (though, I don't know where exactly they would go). I'd imagine migrating as much of our equipment to use ethernet as possible (very little of it currently does), and adding APs would improve/resolve many of the issues we currently have, making the ISP's offer that much more irrelevant... right? It also should be noted that we're planning on beginning to live stream services starting in January. And, with that, I throw this problem out to you guys. Any help/feedback would be much appreciated, and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.
If you lack someone skilled in managing Wi-Fi or firewalls, this price looks quite fair. You won’t need to worry about installing it yourself. I’ve noticed many poorly designed networks at places like churches and similar locations. APs can be tricky to set up properly, so let them handle it. This fiber connection should offer better stability and reliability compared to your current coax line. It’s likely a dedicated fiber line, meaning you won’t share bandwidth with others. If you decide to set it up yourself, you could purchase internet directly from them and manage the LAN yourself, though you might prefer they take care of it unless you have networking experience in similar situations.
Getting everything organized by the ISP feels fortunate. It seems they were ready to present a proposal! LOL! I think you'll end up with a very dependable fiber connection, likely through their unlisted business options. You'll also feel reassured knowing a team is there to ensure everything runs smoothly. However, I've realized that if they can't handle residential setups well, it might be better to handle it myself or hire another company. There are many consulting firms offering various price ranges for different services, and usually you won't be locked into a long-term contract.