The Wi-Fi is fine at one end of the building and useless at the other. Calls drop in the meeting room. The stockroom has never had signal. It all worked perfectly well when there were six of you and one router in the corner, and nobody can say quite when it stopped working.
That is the point at which most people ring us. It is almost never solved by buying a better router.
Why a faster router usually is not the answer
A single router has to cover your whole building from wherever the broadband happens to come in — which is usually a cupboard by the front door, chosen by the builder, not by anyone thinking about signal.
No amount of money spent on that one box changes the physics. Brick walls, steel shelving, plasterboard, distance and a floor above you all absorb the signal, and a more expensive router in the same bad spot reaches roughly as far as a cheap one.
What actually fixes it is two or three access points in the right places, each wired back to a switch. Not more power in one corner — better coverage across the whole floor.
That means cable. Which is why a Wi-Fi problem so often turns out to be a cabling job, and why we would rather look at the building than sell you a box.
Most “slow internet” turns out to have nothing to do with the internet.
We survey before we quote
We walk the building first. Where people actually sit, where they need to move about with a laptop or a scanner, where the signal dies now, and — the practical constraint everyone forgets — where a cable can physically be run without lifting your floor.
You get a plan showing where the points go and what it costs, before you commit to anything.
The cabling
We supply and install structured cabling from a single office to a full campus site.
- Cat6 for new installations. It is the sensible default now, and the price difference over Cat5e is small enough not to argue about.
- Cat5e where it is already in and working. If your existing cabling is sound, we will tell you so rather than rip it out.
- Fibre between buildings, across long runs, or where you need more than copper will carry.
Which one you need depends on the distances involved and what you are moving across the network. We will explain the difference in plain terms and tell you where the money is worth spending.
Tested and labelled, every run
Every cable we install is checked end to end and labelled at both ends, and you get a record of what connects to what.
That sounds like housekeeping. It is worth more than it sounds. In two years, when a socket in the corner of the office stops working, the difference between a five-minute fix and half a day with a tone generator is whether anybody wrote down what went where.
Keeping things separate
Your guest Wi-Fi, your card machine, your CCTV and your accounts should not all be sitting on the same flat network.
Separating them is straightforward — guest traffic gets its own network with no route to your files, and the devices that only need the internet get exactly that and nothing more. It costs nothing extra to do it properly at install time, and it is a great deal of work to retrofit later.
Moving, expanding, or fitting out
If you are moving premises or having work done, talk to us before the walls close up.
Running cable into an empty room being refitted is quick and cheap. Running the same cable once the plasterboard is on, the floor is down and the desks are in is neither. It is the single easiest way to save money on a network, and it only works if someone thinks about it early enough.
Getting started
Tell us roughly the size of the building and what is going wrong, and we will arrange a survey. If your existing network is fundamentally sound and only needs a couple of access points, we will say so.