Network case study · 2026
One Network Design for Three Country Offices
In 2026 I moved the CIMMYT offices in Nepal, Bangladesh and Turkey off end-of-life Cisco and SonicWall equipment onto the same Fortinet design, so that offices without IT staff on site can all be supported remotely in the same way.
Offices without IT staff need to be supportable from anywhere.
Several country offices have no IT staff on site. When each office is built differently, every problem has to be solved differently, and remote support depends on whoever remembers how that office was set up.
All three offices were running equipment that no longer received security updates. Replacing it was the moment to make them the same, so that a fix, a change or a check in one office applies to the others.
The same building blocks in every office.
Same design, three very different deliveries.
| Office | When | How it was delivered | Headline result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nepal | March and September 2026 | On site, in two phases as equipment arrived | Wi-Fi median 5.8 → 92.9 Mbps (different test devices) |
| Bangladesh | July – September 2026 | Planned and pre-configured in advance, cutover Thursday evening to Sunday | Wired median 92 → 723 Mbps |
| Turkey | 28 Sep – 2 Oct 2026 | Fully remote, guiding an on-site colleague by video call | 71.8–93.9 Mbps on the same PC, from 24.4 |
Every office gets the same report.
Each migration ends with a report built from the same script, so the reports are comparable and nothing is skipped.
- Executive summary and scope
- Before and after speed tests, with the number of tests and any reason they are not directly comparable
- Equipment installed and equipment retired
- Port map and network design
- Issues met during the work and how they were handled
- Open items and recommendations, then sign-off
Turning three migrations into a plan for the next one.
Before the next office, I wrote a remote migration plan based on what the three migrations taught. A few settings, such as network numbering and firmware version, still differ between offices; I raised these as decisions to make before the next office rather than copying whichever office came first.
In Bangladesh the speed limit came from 100 Mbps switch ports and the wrong cable, not the firewall.
In Nepal the before and after tests used different devices, which weakened the comparison. The plan now requires the same laptop.
In Turkey the provider's router used the same address range as the firewall's default ports.
Short steps, frequent saves and a second call open made the Turkey migration possible.