Case Study: The Cost of Assuming it’s the Wi-Fi
Network Diagnostics • Strategic IT Recovery
Strategic Summary: When a CEO’s Teams calls consistently failed, the immediate reaction was to replace the entire wireless infrastructure. siFutures intervened, identifying that the issue wasn’t the hardware, but a DNS geolocation error that was routing local traffic halfway across the globe.
The IT Team Under Pressure
The internal IT team was fielding daily complaints about dropped calls. They’d contacted Fortinet support multiple times. Each ticket brought different technicians with conflicting advice. After weeks of random configuration changes, their wireless setup was a mess. Problems persisted.
Our Investigation
When they contacted us through a client referral, we partnered with Duxbury to conduct a comprehensive wireless survey. The results surprised everyone—the Wi-Fi infrastructure was actually fine. But the CEO’s calls were still dropping. They remained determined to replace everything.
Looking Beyond the Obvious
Rather than taking the order for £375,000 worth of new equipment, we suggested a deeper investigation. “This doesn’t make sense,” we told them. “Let’s figure out what’s really causing these drops—because new equipment won’t solve this if it’s not actually a Wi-Fi issue.”
The Real Problem
Working with Duxbury, we deployed internal monitoring that tested Teams connectivity from inside their network. The monitoring revealed the issue. Their Teams connections were routing through Ireland instead of Microsoft’s local South African infrastructure. This created 158ms latency instead of 6ms.
Their FortiGate firewalls were using European DNS servers. This caused geo-distributed services to resolve to European IPs whilst their ISP had connectivity issues to Teams servers in Ireland.
A Simple Solution
We reconfigured their DNS to use Cloudflare and Google servers instead of FortiGuard. Latency immediately dropped to 21ms. Over the following month, the CEO didn’t experience a single dropped call.
Why Partnership Matters
When a client is ready to spend a substantial sum on new equipment, the easy path is to take the order. Instead, we chose to understand the real problem first. Sometimes the best solution costs nothing more than asking the right questions.
Crisis resolved with a DNS configuration change, saving £375,000 and transforming the CEO from frustrated critic to confident advocate.
