There is an old saying "Cheap is not always good, and good is not always cheap" This holds very true when looking at networking products. A lot of these products send your data through your network and get it to the computers for the users to see and use. If you purchase a product that turns out to be poorly designed, you will find your self with a lot of angry calls at the help desk and wonder why. I have seen cases where the users do not consult their help desk and they go out and buy a piece of equipment and buy the cheapest one they can find. Then they hook it up and have problems with connectivity and call the help desk to find out why. Those routers that are 39.99, there is a reason they are that price. They are not good. They will not last, or they have limited features, or they break down every other day. I had a case where a company who I worked for did this very thing. We had provided them with a medium grade business router. It had a dual WAN connection so you could have 2 internet providers for redundancy and it had some decent features on it to manage the device even from a remote location. It was a major name brand and was about 4 years old. It had come time to replace the device but before we were able to it stopped working leaving the users unable to connect to the internet or their cloud to do work. So rather than call the help desk and let us work with them to try to resolve the issue they went to the store and bought a 39 dollar consumer grade router. I don't even remember what the name was, it was a brand I had never even heard of. So they brought it back to the office and plugged it in and put the old one off to the side. Now not only did they run it without changing any configuration leaving it vulnerable to be hacked into, they did not have any idea that we had special settings in the old device telling it how to send data to specific devices that needed to be configured in a special way. Now keep in mind, at this location we have a monitor tool connected remotely that pings their internet connection and reports if the ping stops working. So in the morning I was alerted the site went down and saw it drop out. I reached out to the office to inquire if they were having issues and offer support but the person had already left to go to the store to buy the device. It was a small office with 3 people and 2 of them were out that day. So about an hour goes by and I see the monitor tell me they are back online, so I figure ok they had an internet issue from their provider and the provider fixed it. Great! Nothing to worry about....
What followed was half a day troubleshooting and trying to get things working with that junk device the users purchased! I almost immediately found out that they had switched out the device and because the IP scheme was different, printers that went by IP address could not find the network. The old setup had 192.168.0.X and the new device had the way too popular 192.168.1.X So I had to go in and change that setting to fix that problem. Then I had to adjust the DHCP to go from 100 to 200 not 2 to 150.... Those were easy fixes and after changing the WiFi built in to match what they used to have with the same password (which was pretty secure with numbers and symbols) things were looking up. Then I came to the part to add in firewall rules to forward ports to their respective devices... If you never did this basically you tell the router, if you see traffic coming from a port named 1088 for example: send that data to this address, xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. That tells the router to take the traffic and send it to a specific device that needs data from the specific port address. This would have maybe worked if the developer working on the software for this router was not a complete bone head, who never worked with computers before... The interface to do this was mind boggling and even after I figured out what the hell they were trying to convey on the menus, the programming I put in to allow this did not work. So now the remote IP phones that were at worker's homes would not work. They had an IP based phone system and needed the workers to be able to work from home so we had implemented a PBX that would allow this. Sadly this would never work due to the poorly designed router, and we needed it sooner rather than later, as it was December in the North east and this area was prone to 20 inch snow storms... Now at this point, 3 hours into the call your ready to ask the user, why the **** did you go and buy this piece of **** without consulting me first???? But you cannot do that it is frowned upon and will cause tension on the other side of the phone call. Instead you must mute your phone take 3 deep breaths and then explain to them that they must hobble along today until you can overnight them the correct router they need to have their network run at optimal performance. You must also pray that there is a unit in stock in your storage and hope you can configure it and get it out the door to shipping by 3 pm... Luckily for this office, I did have a new unit in stock and was able to put all the settings in they needed, and was able to apply the latest firmware to give the device all the best security and feature patches the device manufacturer had. The only downside was the device was just a firewall/router without WiFi so they would have no WiFi as the WiFi units that tie together were not in stock and back ordered. The users were fine with this and said WiFi is not a huge deal and they could work without it for a few days. The silver lining on this was that when they got the new router that I sent over, we found a huge wiring issue that was causing network drops and the old router was not smart enough to tell them about it, but the new one did detect it in a rather off the wall way and thanks to its error logs I was able to find out this wire issue and have a tech go out and fix it. Now you might ask, "OK they spent 39.99 on the crap consumer grade router, how much did yours cost, 500 dollars? 750 dollars? 1000 dollars? Is it a large brand name that is huge and popular? "
No, the router we sent out is a Mid grade enterprise device and costs roughly 300 bucks with a 2 year warranty, that also includes a cloud log in to manage the device and there is no additional cost for that feature. So we didn't go top of the line for this new device but we did not go cheap either. Our idea has always been to get the users good hardware that will last, and suite the needs of the office without being too expensive and try to be future proof at the same time. The device we gave them fits that bill to a T and the company that makes it has been updating its firmware to add more features to give them more usability. These devices have been put into 95 percent of our locations we help manage and we don't have too many break down. We always try to make sure the locations know to contact us before they go and buy something so we can get them the right equipment. Spending money for a good product even if it is more money is always better in the long run when it comes to IT and hardware. You will improve the reliability of the network for users, and cut down on user frustration and wasted time calling the Help desk to fix an issue. So remember, Cheap is not always good and good is not always cheap.
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