A friend approached me for a favor to help “fix” the internet and Wi-Fi at his shop. The shop was called Patriot Off-Road out of Roseville, California. Having already spent some time in the shop and having Patriot Off-Road service my vehicle, I figured it would be a fun project to spend some extra time on.
Walking over to the shop, it was observed that there were two PC’s at the front counter, one in the shop and a laptop upstairs. All the workers were utilizing their cell phones on the WiFi for music and calls and there was a CCTV camera system in the shop. With the Gateway and ISP entry point being in a closet behind the front counter, the signal out to the main workshop area was very weak. My friend had also retained other shops around his, approximately 75 yards from the front counter. The main shop was a converted WW2 hangar that had been hardened with 4 feet of concrete and the surrounding buildings were converted pole barns to shop spaces with corrugated steel siding and roof.
Being told there was no real budget to invest in this but $200, with everyone complaining about how slow things were it was time to get to work and see what could be done. Getting on the PC’s in the front, there was an obvious display of “abuse” to some degree with the amount of tabs that were opened on a PC with only 4Gb of RAM on Google Chrome. Finding the model numbers of the sticks and ordering 2 more for 8Gb total on both systems, things sped up a bit for just a couple bucks. System wipes were required though to give a “new PC” feel.
Extenders for the shop area and by the parking lot were installed to extend the WiFi signal the whole area owned by my friend. Phone’s were reconfigured but on their own VLAN and the CCTV system was also put on its own VLAN. There was a public WiFi setup for the workers to use, giving the front counter a good amount of bandwidth. Everyone ended up being happy, my friend could watch his employees from the casinos of Las Vegas, NV and his other far away shop in Idaho. Production was stepped up and the Internet was saved!
