Resolving Recurring Branch Office Network Outages
A network engineer must diagnose daily connection drops across regional branch offices and decide whether to fund costly bandwidth expansions or reconfigure traffic policies.
Context
You are a Network Engineer at a technology and logistics enterprise reporting to the Infrastructure Lead. Over the past two weeks, branch offices have reported severe connection drops and transaction timeouts during peak midday operations. Regional branch managers are calling for an immediate bandwidth expansion across all site circuits, attributing the failures to network saturation. Your Infrastructure Lead has given you 30 minutes to analyze network telemetry, determine the root cause, and provide a clear remediation strategy before management commits capital to circuit upgrades.
Your Task
Submit your network engineering assessment to the Infrastructure Lead structured into exactly three parts: 1. Recommendation — one decision on network infrastructure and policy remediation. 2. Impact — the business numbers and effects, contrasting link upgrade costs against session optimization. 3. Implementation Plan — concrete steps specifying owner, sequence, and timing.
Available Data
Operational telemetry gathered during the peak 14:00 window reveals the following metrics across key sites: | Branch Office | WAN Circuit Capacity | Peak Bandwidth Utilization | Peak Packet Loss | Active Firewall Sessions | Firewall Session Limit | | East Branch | 100 Mbps | 48 Mbps (48%) | 14.2% | 9,950 | 10,000 | | West Branch | 100 Mbps | 52 Mbps (52%) | 16.8% | 9,980 | 10,000 | | Central Hub | 200 Mbps | 94 Mbps (47%) | 0.2% | 4,200 | 50,000 | | South Branch | 100 Mbps | 39 Mbps (39%) | 0.1% | 1,850 | 10,000 | Circuit utilization remains below 55% across all regional offices. Despite healthy bandwidth headroom at East Branch and West Branch, staff report sudden terminal session disconnects and enterprise resource planning timeouts between 13:30 and 15:30 every business day.