Network design and implementation
A network is a set of decisions made once and lived with for a decade. We make those decisions deliberately, write them down, and build to the drawing.
Design first, procure second
The common failure is buying hardware and calling that a design. A vendor quotes a switch stack and an access point count, the equipment arrives, someone racks it, and the addressing scheme gets invented on installation day.
We invert that. The logical design comes first: what traffic exists, what has to be separated from what, where the boundaries are, how the site fails and what happens when it does. Hardware is selected to serve that design, not the other way around.
The output is a document you own. If you ever replace us, the next engineer inherits a network they can understand in an afternoon.
Deliverables
- Physical and logical topology diagrams
- IP addressing and VLAN plan
- Routing, DHCP and DNS design
- Firewall policy intent, written in plain language
- Wireless coverage and channel plan
- Cabling schedule and port map
- Bill of materials with lifecycle dates
- Cutover runbook with rollback steps
- As-built documentation at handover
From walkthrough to handover
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Discovery and site survey
We walk the building. Closets, pathways, existing cable, power, cooling, the demarcation point, and the things nobody mentions until you find them, like a switch in a closet feeding the gate system.
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Requirements and constraints
What has to work, who uses it, when the site cannot be down, what the budget cycle looks like, and which existing equipment has to be carried forward whether we like it or not.
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Logical design
Segmentation, addressing, routing, redundancy and policy. This is where most of the durable value is created, and it costs a fraction of the hardware.
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Physical design and bill of materials
Rack elevations, cabling schedule, port assignments, access point placement, and a parts list with support lifecycle dates so nothing is bought at end of sale.
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Staging and configuration
Equipment is configured and burned in before it goes to site. Cutover night is not the time to discover a firmware bug.
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Cutover
Scheduled around your operations, with a written sequence, a defined point of no return and a rollback that has been thought through in advance.
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Validation and handover
Cable certification results, wireless validation survey, failover testing, as-built documents, and a walkthrough with whoever will be calling us at 2 a.m.
- New building or suite fit-out
- Clubhouse or amenity campus build
- Office relocation and network move
- Switch and firewall refresh at end of life
- Wireless redesign after coverage complaints
- Multi-site connectivity and VPN mesh
- Carrier circuit change or upgrade
- Post-incident rebuild and hardening
Cabling matters more than people think
A meaningful share of the intermittent faults we are called for trace back to termination quality, pathway damage or an undocumented patch. We certify what we install and we test what we inherit.
What we hold to
Segment by trust, not by convenience
Guest, staff, voice, cameras, access control, building automation and management each get their own segment. Flat networks are cheaper to install and far more expensive to own.
One deliberate boundary
Exactly one device owns routing, NAT and policy at the edge. Double NAT and overlapping DHCP scopes are the source of a surprising number of “random” outages.
Design the failure, not just the function
Redundancy that has never been tested is decoration. If the design claims failover, we prove it during validation and we retest it on a schedule.
Buy inside the lifecycle
Every model in a bill of materials is checked against announced end of sale and end of support. Saving money on a platform that loses firmware support in a year is not saving money.
Document as you build
Labels, port maps, diagrams and configuration backups are produced during the work, not reconstructed later from memory. Later never comes.
Keep it maintainable by someone else
Clever configurations that only one engineer understands are a liability. We build for the next person, on the assumption that the next person is not us.
Have a build coming up?
Bring us in during design, not during installation. The decisions that matter most are cheapest to change while they are still on paper.