Services
Networks and Wi-Fi
An office network should be dull. Staff can work. Guests can reach the internet and nothing else. The till, the printer and the door phone are not sitting on the same open wireless as the street. We design for the building in front of us, including the stone and lath common in Devon, not for a glass campus we do not have.
The building comes first
Equipment is chosen after a look at the rooms, not before. Thick stone, lath, foil-backed board and racking all change a wireless design. In a city-centre building the cable route you would draw on a new plan often does not exist. We start from the route that does.
A fixed till, a meeting-room screen or a desk that must not drop is usually better on a cable. We would rather run that cable than pretend the air will do it.
Separation, when it earns its place
Staff, guests and building devices should not share a flat network once the office is large enough for that to matter. A four-person office may not need the complicated version. We will say so. Overbuilding a small site is a way of creating a network nobody can recover at 8am.
Guest access is for the internet. It is not a courtesy path into the file share.
What you keep
You should be left with a diagram, a note of the equipment, and the administrator details. Those do not live only with us. If we part company, the network remains understandable.
Existing equipment is reused where it is sound and we can support it. Replacement is recommended when the equipment is the cause of the failure, or it can no longer be supported. It is not the default opening.
Related
Questions
- Will you reuse our existing equipment?
Where it is sound and we can support it, yes. Replacement is recommended when the equipment is causing the failure, or it can no longer be supported, not as a matter of course.
- Do you publish a preferred brand of wireless?
No. The building and the way you work decide the equipment. The make is recorded in your papers so the next person knows what they are looking at.