Network design
Open plan desking, meeting rooms, breakout spaces and a recreation area, all needing to work from the first morning. A leased line and a UniFi network designed as one system rather than two.
The situation
A music licensing business had bought a new office in Liverpool city centre to bring 120 staff under one roof. The layout was open plan desking, with meeting rooms, breakout rooms and recreational areas arranged around it.
An empty building needs everything at once. A wired connection to every desk. Wi-Fi that holds up in the communal areas, where nobody is sitting at a desk with a cable. And connectivity in the meeting and breakout rooms, which is where the conversations with clients actually happen.
They came to us because we had worked with them before. That mattered here, because a fit-out is a programme rather than a job, and it has a fixed date attached to it.
What we did
The desks and the Wi-Fi were designed together, because in an office like this the two fail in the same places.
The outcome
The office opened with connectivity nobody had to think about. Every desk is wired, the Wi-Fi holds up in the rooms and the communal spaces, and a leased line means 120 people sharing a connection does not feel like 120 people sharing a connection.
Because it all runs through one UniFi controller, adding a desk, rotating a Wi-Fi key or working out why a single device is misbehaving is a few minutes of work rather than a site visit. They came back to us on the strength of the last job. The measure of this one is how rarely they have needed to call since.
Questions
Usually, yes. Business broadband is contended, so the speed you get depends partly on what everyone else in the area is doing. With 120 people on video calls, file transfers and cloud applications at the same time, a dedicated circuit removes that variable. It also gives you the same speed up as down, which matters as soon as people start hosting calls rather than joining them.
Wi-Fi is shared airtime. However well it is designed, every device in a room is taking turns. A wired desk is predictable, does not degrade when the room fills up, and gives you something to fall back on. In an open plan office of this size, cabling the desks is what allows the Wi-Fi to be good in the places that need it.
It is the brain of the network. Routing, firewall, switching and the controller for the access points all sit in one appliance, so instead of managing several separate systems you get one interface that shows every device, every connection and every access point in the building. For an in-house team, that is the difference between managing a network and guessing at one.
Yes, if they are surveyed rather than assumed. These spaces get missed because coverage plans tend to follow the desks, and they are usually the rooms with the awkward walls, the glass and the furniture that absorbs signal. We plan them in deliberately, because they are the areas people notice.
Tell us the floorplan and the date you need to be in. We will tell you honestly what is achievable and what it takes.
