This reminds me of something I lived through as a nerdy teenager working a summer job as first line IT support at the headquarters of a multinational, in the mid-90s...
One day, I started receiving calls (through my pager!) from rather many people about intermittent networking problems. The state of the art 10mbit wired UTP network would have frequent bursts of 90% package loss.
What was weird: only people on the fifth floor would have this issue..!? Our first thought was that they were on a single hub/switch that might have broken. But no, they were connected to the same uplinks as the computers on the problem-free surrounding floors. Furthermore, laptop users (who were of course also wired at the time) were reporting no problems whatsoever.
We were pretty much out of ideas by that point, but did an experiment just to test our assumptions: we took a PC and hooked it up with a long network cable and a power extension cable on the fourth floor and started pinging it. Flawless. Then we started walking up the stairs, and, yes indeed, somewhere around halfway up the stairs packets started to drop. (But not at all times, sometimes it would be fine, like all PCs on the fifth.)
If you want to guess at the cause, this is your chance. :-)
We brought in a company specialized in EM interference. It turns out that a GSM antenna placed on the roof of the four story building opposite to ours about half a year ago, had just been turned on. Its height aligned to our fifth flour. Whenever someone was using this mast to make a call (which certainly wasn't all of the time back then), it would cause interference on a specific model of network card that we were using in all of our PCs. It had a relatively large metal component that was apparently a pretty good 900 MHz antenna.
When confronted, the mobile operator quickly adjusted the antenna to not be directed at us. I believe all network cards were replaced soon after. Fun times!
One day, I started receiving calls (through my pager!) from rather many people about intermittent networking problems. The state of the art 10mbit wired UTP network would have frequent bursts of 90% package loss.
What was weird: only people on the fifth floor would have this issue..!? Our first thought was that they were on a single hub/switch that might have broken. But no, they were connected to the same uplinks as the computers on the problem-free surrounding floors. Furthermore, laptop users (who were of course also wired at the time) were reporting no problems whatsoever.
We were pretty much out of ideas by that point, but did an experiment just to test our assumptions: we took a PC and hooked it up with a long network cable and a power extension cable on the fourth floor and started pinging it. Flawless. Then we started walking up the stairs, and, yes indeed, somewhere around halfway up the stairs packets started to drop. (But not at all times, sometimes it would be fine, like all PCs on the fifth.)
If you want to guess at the cause, this is your chance. :-)
We brought in a company specialized in EM interference. It turns out that a GSM antenna placed on the roof of the four story building opposite to ours about half a year ago, had just been turned on. Its height aligned to our fifth flour. Whenever someone was using this mast to make a call (which certainly wasn't all of the time back then), it would cause interference on a specific model of network card that we were using in all of our PCs. It had a relatively large metal component that was apparently a pretty good 900 MHz antenna.
When confronted, the mobile operator quickly adjusted the antenna to not be directed at us. I believe all network cards were replaced soon after. Fun times!