Bytewiser Data Systems,Inc.

What was the cost?

This network was installed by a licensed electrician a little less than a year before we replaced it. It is a heavily used network with approx. 100 users who access several database servers to create customer files, order files, accounting ledgers and so forth. Since they were working in real time taking phone orders and entering data, the network was constantly in use during business hours. Let's play with some hypothetical numbers. We have no idea what the customer paid for this original cabling job, but let's say it was $5000.00. Cheap yes, but let's assume the customer got a "deal". Let's also assume the average worker in this office made $10.00 per hour. (I'm trying to be conservative here). That would actually cost the owner about $13.00 per hour with taxes, benefits and such, probably more. This network was severely congested, with slow logons, slow file transfers, generally slow response. There were frequent outages due to cabling problems where one or more workstations were affected. After the re-cabling, we were told by the network administrator that the network was running about twice as fast with no down time for cable issues. Bear in mind that we installed no new electronic devices, although we did re-configure some of them a little. If we are very conservative, we can assume that each employee probably lost at least a half hour a day, but probably much more. Let's use half an hour. That's .5 hours x 5 days x 50 weeks x 100 employees x $13 = $162,500.00 + the original $5000.00 to do the job + roughly 25 to 50 % of the network administrator's time chasing problems that should never have been. The last time we checked, network administrators made considerably more than $10.00 an hour. Needless to say, we think we can very safely assume that this company lost at least $175,000.00 within one year. If you don't think so, We would like to see your math on the problem. Poorly implemented networks are very very expensive. End of story.