LawnCheck provides a connection log so you can monitor connection quality. The connection log will typically contain outage entries of 10 to 15 minutes in length every so often. These are typically the result of everyday network congestion and are considered normal and generally will not effect LawnCheck irrigation.
If you consistantly see outages of 1 hour or longer, this is not considered a "normal" service level and you'll want to investigate. On-line games, movie downloads, and bit-torrent have the propensity to consume your complete bandwidth, and will cause outage entries in your LawnCheck connection log. Check the times in your log and see if they coincide with large file downloads or periods of on-line game play.
Bit-torrent runs at random times, and you may not know you have it installed on your computer, so you'd have to look for activity lights on your switch and router or do some research to see if it is running in the background on one or more of your computers.
If you have games, downloads, and bit-torrent, and these are the cause of your outages you can locate the software and adjust the bandwidth usage within the software applications. This should cut down or eliminate outages caused by bandwidth hogging applications.
See Part II for more
