Ask HN: How to hire a small network installation contractor

[dasil003]

At my current job we have redundant Internet connections: a DSL line (hooked up to wireless) and a dual T1 (hooked up to ethernet). For the most part they work pretty well, and when we have problems with one we switch to the other.

The problem is that the whole setup is pretty ghetto. We have a consumer grade router and switch splitting the T1 to about 8 of the 24 ethernet ports that are wired in the building. We occasionally see dropped connections and other flakiness on the T1 which I attribute to either A) the crappy hardware or B) some of the wiring might be bad in the building.

We've always just muddled through this ourselves, but we're starting to see a little traction and we don't have time to screw around anymore. We want to pay someone to come in for half a day, assess the situation, recommend a router purchase, wire up and test the rest of our ethernet ports.

Should be an easy job, but the question is how do you hire someone like this? Any specific recommendations for someone in Palo Alto?

[Travis]

Have you tried craigslist in the freelance section? I'd interview them on the phone before hiring, but if you have some technical competency you should be able to listen through a bad contractor's BS.

[dasil003 → Travis]

Haven't tried for this specifically, though we have found contractors for small jobs on craigslist before and it's never been very good. One guy we hired for a media encoding job early on was such a loser he actually tried to blackmail us until our CEO verbally castrated him.

This seems like the kind of thing that you go through your network to find. I figured HN would be the next best thing, but unfortunately no upvotes so none of the thousand members here that could probably help me even saw this. Ah well.