Network planning

A 10Gb upgrade across a shared building in Manchester

Multi-tenant, multi-VLAN, and no appetite for downtime. Planning is what made the roll-out uneventful.

10GbLEASED LINE DELIVERED

Per tenantVLAN SEGREGATION

PPSKSECURE SHARED WI-FI

MinimalDOWNTIME DURING CUTOVER

The situation

What they were dealing with.

A large shared and serviced office building in Manchester had outgrown its connectivity. The existing leased line could not support what the tenants were doing, the internal cabling and equipment were behind the times, and the Wi-Fi did not follow anybody around the building.

Shared buildings make all of this harder. Every tenant is a separate business with its own security expectations, its own requirements and its own tolerance for being offline. You cannot simply take the building down for a day.

10Gb leased line and per-tenant Wi-Fi for a Manchester serviced office

What we did

The work, step by step.

What we did

Most of the work happened before anyone touched a cable.

Upgraded the leased line to 10Gb to give the building genuine headroom rather than just enough for today.

Replaced the cabling and network equipment so the infrastructure could actually carry it.

Designed VLAN segregation per tenant, so each business sits on its own logical network and cannot see its neighbours.

Deployed PPSK for the shared Wi-Fi, giving every tenant their own key onto the same infrastructure, with their traffic kept separate.

Planned Wi-Fi coverage across the whole building so people roam between floors and shared spaces without dropping.

Managed security, port routing and forwarding centrally rather than leaving each tenant to fend for themselves.

Spoke to every tenant individually about whether they needed static IPs and what their applications required.

The outcome

What changed.

The building now runs one properly designed network instead of a shared connection everyone complains about. Tenants get their own segregated network and their own Wi-Fi key, roaming works across the whole building, and the landlord has connectivity that is a selling point for the space rather than an apology during viewings.

The roll-out itself was uneventful, which was the entire aim. That came from the tenant-by-tenant conversations and the sequencing done beforehand, not from anything that happened on installation day.

Questions

Common questions on this.

What is PPSK and why use it in a shared building?

PPSK, or private pre-shared key, gives every tenant their own Wi-Fi password on the same physical infrastructure. Their traffic is kept separate from their neighbours, and if one tenant leaves you revoke one key rather than changing the password for the whole building.

Can tenants in a shared building have their own static IPs?

Yes. We ask each tenant individually, because some need a static IP for VPNs, remote access or hosted applications and others do not. Establishing that during planning avoids reconfiguring the network after everyone has moved in.

How do you keep one tenant's network separate from another?

VLAN segregation. Each tenant sits on its own logical network on the shared infrastructure, so they cannot see or reach each other's devices, and security and routing policies can be applied per tenant rather than to the building as a whole.

Does a building upgrade mean downtime for tenants?

It should not. The work is sequenced so the existing service stays up while the new infrastructure is built alongside it, with the cutover planned around the tenants rather than the installer. That planning is the reason it goes quietly.

Leased lines Networks and Wi-Fi

In the same position?

Tell us what is happening and we will tell you honestly what can be done, and how quickly.

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