TFS agent-side checkout - pause

Somewhat recently we've been experiencing this sporadic build issue where all of the agents pause at some point during the TFS checkout step.  The agents don't throw any errors that we can find and after a few minutes (3-5) they start up again.  We're highly confident that there's a intermittent, yet consistent network issue that triggers the issue but we've had little success when we've engaged the support teams because we cannot produce any hard evidence (no hard errors).  Is there a timeout we can set for the VCS root (or possibly at in the agent config) so that when the issue occurs, the checkout fails almost immediately? Any guidance would be appreciated.  Thanks.