Desks, tills, printers. Shop & office network cabling Across Nottingham

The job

What I install

• Data points at each desk, till, printer or wall-mounted screen.
• Network switches, 4 to 24 port. PoE where you’re powering access points, phones or cameras down the cable.
• Patch panels and small wall cabinets, cables dressed and numbered.
• Wired access points for staff and customer WiFi, so the signal comes from where the people are rather than from a router in the stockroom.
• Runs through blockwork, stud walls and suspended ceilings, to a back office, or to an outbuilding on the same site.
• Broadband in on a Virgin Media Hub or an Openreach master socket. I work from either.
• Tidy-ups of what’s already there, so the cabinet makes sense to the next person who opens it. If the mess is the whole job, see cable tidy and repairs.

If you’re fitting out a new unit or an extension and the walls are still open, new build first fix covers getting the cable in before the plasterer.

How a typical job goes

I visit, count the points, agree where the cabinet goes and quote. Nothing starts until you’ve got a price.

On the day I run the cables back to the cabinet, punch them down on a numbered patch panel, fit the switch, patch through and test each port with a cable tester. Each pair in the right slot. The number on the panel matches the number on the faceplate at the other end, written by hand, so nobody has to trace a cable in five years’ time.

Then I clear up. Dust sheet down, brick dust gone, and the place is left as I found it.

A job in Lowdham, and a 97-to-547 fix

The photo of me with the ladder behind me was taken on a job for a client in Lowdham. Village or city unit, the job is the same: cable in from where the broadband lands, data points where the work happens, everything numbered and tested.

One customer’s upstairs home office had a cable from another engineer testing at 97 Mbps on a 500 Mbps Virgin Media Business line. He got in touch and I fitted him in the next day. I replaced the cable and the boxes. His speed test afterwards read 547 Mbps down and 12 ms ping, on the same line. His words: “Don’t make my mistake and pay twice.”

Another customer needed a cable from the router to his home office and I came the same day. He wrote “Quick, effective and reasonably priced”. Both are in full on the reviews page.

Working around you

Message me a sketch of the floor plan, the back of an envelope is fine, and a photo of where the broadband comes in. Most small jobs I can quote from that. Bigger ones I’ll come and look at first.

If the job has to happen when the shop’s shut, say so when you message and I’ll tell you what I can do. I turn up with my own tools and my own ladders and I do the work myself, start to finish. There’s no crew to brief and nobody else’s diary to wait on.

If it’s one or two sockets in a home office rather than a shop, the ethernet sockets page is the better read. More cabinets and patch panels are in my work photos.

What it costs

No price list, because the number depends on how many data points you need, how far each run is, what the walls are made of and whether the switch and cabinet need supplying. Send the sketch and the photo and I’ll come back with a figure, or arrange to look. Travel is in the quote, not added afterwards. How pricing works.