For an auto body shop in Oklahoma, hail season is the busiest and most financially important time of the year. Claims volume spikes. Adjuster communications multiply. Estimates need to be processed and uploaded quickly. The margin for downtime is essentially zero.
Which made repeated, unexplained internet outages at the worst possible time not just frustrating — but genuinely threatening to the business.
The ISP Said There Was No Problem. There Clearly Was.
The outages were happening consistently. The shop was losing connectivity at critical moments — unable to upload insurance claims, unable to communicate with adjusters, unable to process estimates that needed to move quickly to keep up with the seasonal surge.
When the shop called Cox, they were told no outage existed. The problem was not on the ISP’s end. So what was causing it?
IT Medics of Oklahoma was brought in to find out.
A Misconfiguration, a Missing IP, and a Manager Out of State
The diagnosis came down to two separate issues — neither of which was a failing piece of hardware.
The firewall at the shop was configured to obtain its IP address via DHCP, meaning it expected the router to assign it an address automatically. But the Cox connection at that location required a static IP — a fixed address that had to be manually entered. The firewall was configured wrong for the connection type it was using, causing periodic authentication failures that manifested as outages.
Resolving this required the static IP information. That information was held by a manager who was out of state and difficult to reach. Until it could be obtained, the shop’s internet remained unreliable.
Keeping the Business Running While the Problem Was Resolved
IT Medics did not wait for the static IP situation to resolve itself before acting. A Starlink system was deployed as emergency backup internet to keep the shop operational while the primary connection issue was being worked through.
This was not a perfect long-term solution. But it kept the shop online — processing claims, communicating with adjusters, uploading estimates — during the busiest stretch of the year while the correct fix was being implemented.
Once Cox provided the static IP information and the firewall was reconfigured correctly, primary internet connectivity was restored. At that point, the Starlink was kept in place as a permanent failover rather than being removed. Given what the shop had just experienced, having a second connection ready to take over automatically was an obvious decision.
A second issue was later identified and resolved: a failing fiber cable in the physical line serving the location, which Cox ultimately replaced. That was responsible for a separate recurring outage that had been intermittently compounding the problem.
What This Situation Revealed
The outages were ultimately caused by a configuration error, a documentation gap, and a hardware failure — three separate problems that would have been identified and addressed much earlier under proactive network management.
The static IP information should have been documented and accessible to whoever manages the business’s technology, not held by a single person in another state. The firewall configuration should have been audited when the connection was set up. And a failover connection — whether a second ISP or an LTE/Starlink backup — should have been in place before hail season, not deployed in response to an emergency during it.
These are straightforward measures. They are also the kind of measures that tend to get skipped until a crisis makes them impossible to ignore.
Connectivity Is Infrastructure — Treat It That Way
Your internet connection is not background utility. For most businesses, it is the system that everything else runs on. Insurance claims, payment processing, email, scheduling, cloud-based tools — all of it depends on reliable connectivity. When it fails during your busiest season, the cost is real and immediate.
IT Medics of Oklahoma provides network assessment, firewall configuration, and failover planning for local businesses. If your operation depends on connectivity and you do not have a plan for what happens when it goes down, that is a conversation worth having before the next busy season.
Call 918-248-6747 or email Info@itmedicsofoklahoma.com to get started.
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