Our Internet is Painfully Slow |
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We received a call from a client on Dublin's Dame St. Their internet connection was slow and sometimes did not work at all. We ran an internet speed test. The results were nowhere near to what speed they were subscribed to with their broadband provider. We looked at the lights on the firewall and DSL router.
Both devices were blinking quite rapidly, indicating a high volume of traffic. We were wondering what it could be? a denial-of-service attack, a bad ethernet switch or something else? We asked the client if any changes happened to their network recently and they told us that they had added a wireless access point, one month ago.
We accessed the management configuration utility for the access point to discover that 9 users were logged on. But there were only 3 users in their office who actually use wireless internet access! It turns out there was a café downstairs and a lot of the café's patrons where piggybacking on this wireless internet connection draining the bandwidth.
We secured the wireless access point with WPA encryption and finally the internet connection speed came back to normal.