Network Wiring for My Office

If the wireless drops during a client call, this page is for you

Small offices usually get wired once, by whoever was available, and then grow. Someone adds a desk. Someone daisy chains a little switch off another little switch. A camera goes in. The video calls start freezing on Tuesday afternoons and nobody can say why.

Almost always, the cause is that the office is running on wireless and improvisation where it should be running on cable. Wireless is shared. Everyone in the room takes a turn. Add a few more people, a couple of cameras uploading, and a cloud backup, and there is not enough turn to go around.

Desks on cable. Wireless for the things that move. That is the whole principle, and it survives you doubling in size.

What a proper job looks like

  • A plan drawn against your actual floor plan before anything is installed: how many outlets, where, and where the equipment lives.
  • Cable to every desk that stays still, phones and printers included.
  • Wireless designed for the space, not one box in the middle hoping for the best. Access points placed where the people are, with cable behind each one.
  • A tidy place for the equipment to live. A rack or a wall mount, ventilated, not a shelf in a cupboard with a coat over it.
  • Everything labelled at both ends. Both ends. This is the difference between a five minute fix and an hour of tracing.
  • Every connection tested before anyone leaves.
  • Written as-built documentation. What is installed, where it is, how it is set up. Yours to keep, and worth its weight the first time somebody else has to work on it.

Room to grow, built in now

The cheapest cable you will ever run is the one you run while the ceiling is already open.

A good design leaves spare capacity: a few more outlets than you need today, spare ports on the switch, cable pulled to the places you might want a camera or an access point later. It costs very little during the work and it saves a whole return visit afterwards.

Cameras, doors and phones on the same system

If you want cameras, keyless doors, or phones, they can run on the same network and be managed in one place rather than three. Doors can be logged, so you know which fob opened which door and when, which matters more than people expect the first time it comes up.

You do not have to do all of it at once. You do want to say what you might want, before the cable goes in.

The equipment, and what it costs

The systems used here are Ubiquiti UniFi: professional networking hardware that your business owns outright, with no per-device licence and no monthly fee to manage your own network. If your business has to answer questions about who accessed what, it keeps its own records, locally.

Equipment goes on your quote at cost. The manufacturer’s price, nothing added. The charge is for design, installation and configuration, which means the person specifying your equipment does not earn more by specifying more of it.

Design and labour are quoted per site, because a six desk office and a twenty desk office with a warehouse are not the same job.

If you want to understand the hardware first, it is all documented free at the AVNFi UniFi wiki. No signup.

Doing it around your business

Most of this can be staged so nobody loses a working day: cable pulled after hours or in phases, the cutover done at a time you pick. Say what your quiet window is and the plan gets built around it.

Get a plan for your office

Tell us roughly how many desks, what the building is, and what keeps going wrong.

Get a quote or call (587) 858-4888

Serving Calgary, Okotoks, Airdrie, Cochrane and Chestermere.