Case studies usually read like everything went perfectly. These four did work out, but they are more useful for what they say about how these problems actually arrive: on a bank holiday, in a building somebody said could not be connected, or quietly over a year of missed bookings nobody counted. Four real jobs across Merseyside, and what each one is worth knowing.
The short version
- A Liverpool restaurant lost its line on a bank holiday and was trading again the same day on 5G.
- A Prescot pub was told fibre was unavailable. It was not, by a different supplier.
- A Skelmersdale salon was losing bookings every time the phone line failed.
- A Liverpool city centre office needed 120 desks to work on day one.
- The pattern: the first answer you are given is often not the only answer.
On this page
The bank holiday outage
A Liverpool restaurant. The master socket failed on a bank holiday Friday, which is about the worst possible timing for a restaurant. With the line down, the card machines, the booking line and the delivery platform tablets all stopped at once.
That is the detail worth noticing. People think of a broadband fault as an inconvenience, something that stops email. For a restaurant on a bank holiday it stops the takings. Orders from Just Eat and Deliveroo do not arrive, cards cannot be taken, and the phone nobody can answer is the booking line.
We got them running the same day on 5G rather than waiting for a line repair that was not going to happen over a bank holiday weekend. The full write-up is in our case study on emergency 5G for a Liverpool restaurant.
The lesson: the time to arrange a backup is not during the outage. A data SIM sitting in a drawer in a small router costs very little and turns a lost weekend into an inconvenience. Our guide to automatic failover covers making it switch over on its own.
"You cannot get fibre here"
A pub in Prescot. They had been told fibre was not available at the premises, and had accepted it, because why would you not.
The problem is that most availability checkers query one network. If that network has not built to your address, the answer comes back as no, and that answer gets repeated by everyone who runs the same check. It is not wrong exactly, it is just incomplete.
We found an alternative supplier who could reach the building. The detail is in the case study on connecting a pub in Prescot.
This comes up often enough in Merseyside that it is worth treating "no fibre here" as a first answer rather than a final one, particularly in older buildings and on the edges of town centres. Our post on what to do when there is no full fibre at your address runs through the options.
The bookings nobody counted
A salon in Skelmersdale. Their phone line kept failing, and every time it did, bookings were lost. Not dramatically, just quietly, a few at a time, which is exactly why it had gone unaddressed for so long.
This is the most common version of a phone problem and the least likely to get fixed, because it never produces a crisis. Nobody logs the calls that did not connect. A salon, a garage or a dental practice simply has a slightly quieter week and puts it down to the weather.
The fix was moving the phone system off the line entirely. On a hosted system the number lives in software, with desktop and mobile apps, so a line fault stops being a business problem. The write-up is in our case study on hosted VoIP for a Skelmersdale salon.
If you take bookings by phone, our post on every missed call being a customer hiring someone else is worth five minutes.
120 desks, day one
A Liverpool city centre office. A 120-desk fit-out, where the requirement was simply that everything worked from the first morning: a leased line, a UniFi network, and Wi-Fi that held up in the meeting rooms and breakout areas rather than only at the desks.
Fit-outs are where lead times matter most, because the connectivity is the one element that cannot be compressed at the end. Furniture arrives when you order it. A leased line arrives when the civil work allows. The full write-up is in our case study on fitting out a Liverpool city centre office.
If you are planning a move, our guide to checking the broadband before you sign the lease explains why this is the thing to settle first.
What these have in common
Four different businesses, four different problems, and the same three themes underneath.
- The first answer is often not the only answer. "No fibre here" meant no fibre from one network. It is worth asking somebody to check properly before you plan around a no.
- The expensive failures are quiet. A bank holiday outage is obvious. A salon losing a handful of bookings a month is not, and over a year it costs more.
- Timing decides the cost. Every one of these was cheaper to solve before it mattered than during. The restaurant would have had a boring weekend with a backup SIM already in place.
Got one of these problems?
If you have been told something cannot be done at your address, or you are quietly losing calls, it is worth a second opinion. We will tell you honestly whether there is a better option, including when the answer is that there is not.