At a sprawling, mixed-use university campus with buildings over 160 years old, ALC New England faced a monumental challenge: improving the performance of an OT network plagued by misconfigurations and vendor conflicts. With systems spanning diverse hardware, protocols, and vendors, maintaining optimal performance was no small feat.
As Matt Hogan, Service Project Engineer at ALC New England, explains, “One of the big issues at this location is maintaining and optimizing our systems within a network with so many integrations. It’s a lot of vendors.”
This diversity had a downside: misconfigurations and conflicts between vendor-installed devices were alarmingly common. For the university, the result was persistent slowdowns and unpredictable network performance. Despite efforts by the facility staff, pinpointing the root cause proved elusive. ALC stepped in, equipped with a powerful tool: Optigo Visual Networks (OptigoVN).
The Campus Network Challenge
The university’s OT network mirrored the complexity of its historic campus. Vendors often added devices without ensuring IP or MAC addresses were unique, leading to network duplication and mysterious, hard-to-diagnose disruptions. For the university, this meant:
- Slow, unreliable performance.
- Frustrated staff unable to diagnose the problem.
ALC needed precise, device-level insights into the network’s behavior to solve the issue. They turned to OptigoVN for its advanced diagnostics and seamless remote access capabilities.
How OptigoVN Delivered the Solution
Using OptigoVN, ALC was able to perform hourly packet captures and analyze network traffic with granular diagnostics. The results were clear—and surprising.
Two major issues were identified:
- Excessive broadcast traffic from a misconfigured lighting system on another network.
- Duplicate BBMDs were causing unnecessary rebroadcasts and increasing network congestion.
With OptigoVN’s advanced analytics, the team quickly traced the problems and coordinated solutions for the university facility team. The lighting system, which was mistakenly set to read subscriptions instead of COV (change of value), was reconfigured, and the duplicate BBMDs were located and disabled by the vendor.
Matt highlighted the significance of these insights. “OptigoVN’s diagnostics alerted us to the source of this excess broadcast traffic specifically. Because OptigoVN sees the whole network, we get visibility into other vendors’ equipment as well. It was great to be able to go above and beyond to make the whole network better for everyone.”
The Result: Optimized Network Performance in Minutes
With the issues resolved, the university’s OT network performance improved dramatically. By identifying and addressing these stubborn problems quickly, ALC not only met but exceeded their client’s expectations.
- Network slowdowns were eliminated.
- In-house teams gained better visibility into performance trends.
As Matt observed, using OptigoVN saved time and effort while delivering results the client could trust.
Want to know more? Download the full case study here.
Transform Your OT Network with OptigoVN
For ALC New England, OptigoVN was more than a troubleshooting tool—it was a game-changer for diagnosing and solving network issues efficiently. With over 28 different network diagnostics, and external sharing features with a Site Scope+ subscription, OptigoVN’s robust BACnet monitoring gives you deep OT network visibility and instantly reveals problems, allowing you to resolve issues in minutes rather than hours or days, and prevent them from happening again.
With Optigo Visual Networks, client OT network monitoring and troubleshooting just got easier. To find out for yourself, click here to request a demo, or create your free account and start exploring today.
