How to test your local network to see if it is the cause of poor lab performance.

Your labs are hosted at our co-location site with our datacenter partner. We receive alerts whenever issues (power, cooling, networking, etc.) occur and fix these issues immediately. The cause of poor performance or lab disconnects is local networking. Here are some things to check for local networking:

1. Is it wireless? Wireless networking can be very iffy with saturation, signal quality and bandwidth loss happening at any time
2. Is it congested. Often training centers run many classes through one Internet link. This can lead to periods of high usage and bandwidth contention
3. Is it poor quality. We still see training centers who use poor quality Internet links (DSL, low end retail cable services, etc.). It is always a good idea to go over to SpeedTest.net and check your network speed and reliability. If you want to check the entire path, please have SpeedTest check the speed to Toronto Ontario Canada
4. Are students watching online videos. Always a great bandwidth sapper
5. Are students bit-torrenting files. Again, say goodbye to your bandwidth
6. Are training center technicians using Ghost or other imaging tools to image PCs during your class? These saturate the network with broadcasts and kill performance for everyone
7. Is the local router/gateway having problems? Often this is the cause of network issues. A great tool (works best in Linux but works OK in Windows) is MTR. This tool does a combination of ping and traceroute. It tells you how your traffic gets to our server and if any hops along the way are having issues

Lots to look at but most likely you will find the cause of your issues in one of the above.