Network solutions in London that nobody has to think about
A network is noticed twice: on the day it is installed and on the day it fails.
Logic Networks designs, installs and looks after the network underneath the work: cabling, switches, wireless, firewalls, the lines between your offices and the remote access your people use from home.
We work with organisations across London and the rest of the UK, in single offices, across several sites and in buildings that were never designed for this.
Most of what we are asked for begins as a complaint rather than a project. Wireless that drops in one corner, a connection that slows every afternoon, or an office move with six weeks’ notice.
Almost every network problem we are called to is a problem of records, not of equipment.
Nobody knows which cable goes where, which rule on the firewall is still needed, or why one switch was replaced and the next was not. The equipment is usually fine.
- A written record of what is installed and where it runs
- Equipment with a known age and end of support date
- Wireless surveyed rather than guessed
- Guest access kept away from your own systems
What is included
Six areas, from the cable in the wall to the person working at home.
Few organisations need all six at once. An office move needs most of them; a wireless complaint needs one.
Cabling and the comms cabinet
Labelled, tested and documented.
Structured cabling for a new office or a refit, terminated properly, tested and labelled at both ends, with the cabinet tidy enough that the next person can work in it.
Labelling sounds trivial and is the single thing that decides whether a future fault takes ten minutes or a morning. Every installation we do is handed over with a plan of what runs where.
Switches and the local network
Sized for the building, not for the brochure.
The switches that connect everything, arranged so that the printers, the telephones, the cameras and your computers are not all sharing one flat network.
Separating them is not about performance for most organisations. It is about limiting what a single compromised device can reach, and making a fault possible to isolate.
Wireless
Surveyed, not guessed.
Wireless designed from a survey of your actual building, including the walls that absorb signal and the corner where nothing has ever worked.
Guest access is kept on its own network so a visitor’s laptop cannot see your files. That is a setting rather than a product, and it is missing in most offices we survey.
Firewalls and the boundary
Rules that are reviewed, not accumulated.
The firewall configured rather than merely installed, with the rules reviewed periodically and the old ones removed.
A firewall gathers permissions over the years. The rule opened for a supplier in 2019 is still there, and nobody dares remove it because nobody knows what it was for. We document each one so that question has an answer.
Remote access and connecting offices
Reachable from anywhere it should be.
Access from home built so that the device and the person can both be verified, and links between offices so that two sites behave like one.
We also arrange and manage the internet lines themselves, including the second connection that takes over when the first one fails, which matters more than most organisations expect until the day it does.
Monitoring and replacement
Replaced on a plan, not after a failure.
The network watched so a failing switch or a saturated line is noticed before your team reports it, and firmware kept current in planned windows.
Each piece of equipment has an age and a date after which the manufacturer stops issuing fixes. Both go in your asset record, so replacements appear in a budget rather than in an emergency.
How it works
Three arrangements, chosen by how urgent the problem is.
A complaint about wireless does not need a contract. An office move does not need a monthly arrangement. Both are available on their own.
Tell us what is going wrong, or what date you have to be out of your current building, and we will say which one applies.
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A survey or a review
We look at the building, the cabinet and the rules, and come back with what we would change and what it costs. Useful before you spend on equipment.
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An installation project
A new office, a refit, a move or a replacement. Scoped, dated, tested and handed over with the documentation.
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Managed network
Monitoring, firmware, rule reviews and replacement planning as part of managed IT.
Who it is for
Network work is triggered by buildings and by growth. A new floor, a move, a team that has doubled, or a landlord who has changed the building’s internet arrangement.
It is also triggered by security questions, because the boundary and the wireless are two of the areas every questionnaire asks about.
- Businesses moving office or taking on more space
- Charities and non profits in older buildings with difficult walls
- Education organisations covering classrooms, halls and outdoor areas
- Multi site organisations where each office was set up differently
- Organisations whose wireless has one corner that never works
- Anyone whose firewall rules nobody can explain
What we need from you
Three things, and the first one usually does not exist yet.
Where you do not have it, we produce it as part of the work. It is better to admit that at the start than to discover it during an installation.
A plan of the building
Even a rough floor plan with the walls marked. Wireless is decided by walls, and a survey with a plan takes half the time of one without.
Access to the equipment
Passwords for the switches, the firewall and the wireless controller, plus the account with your internet supplier. A device nobody can sign in to has to be reset, which means an outage.
Access to the building
When we can be on site, and who lets us into the cupboards and risers. Installation dates are usually set by building access rather than by the work itself.
What we usually find in a survey
These come up in most buildings, and each one changes what the work costs.
- Cables terminated but never tested, some of which do not work
- Nothing labelled, so every change starts with tracing
- Printers, cameras and computers all on one flat network
- Guest wireless able to reach the company’s own systems
- Switches past the date the manufacturer stopped issuing fixes
- A second internet line being paid for that has never been configured to take over
- Access points positioned for tidiness rather than for coverage
- A comms cabinet with no ventilation, in a room that gets warm
Our steps for working together
Network work has a fixed order, because each stage depends on the one before it being right. Skipping the survey is the usual cause of an installation that has to be revisited.
- Survey The building walked, the cabinet opened, the existing equipment listed and the wireless measured where it matters. Written up with a plan.
- Design and costs What goes where, why, and what it comes to. Including the option of keeping equipment you already own.
- Install Cabling, equipment and configuration, scheduled around building access and around your working hours.
- Test and label Every cable tested, every port labelled, coverage checked in the places that were complained about.
- Handover The documentation given to you: what is installed, how it is configured, which port is which and what the passwords are.
- Keep it current Monitoring, firmware in planned windows, rule reviews and a replacement date recorded for each item.
How we set priorities
A whole site unable to work comes first, then a floor or a team, then one person, then anything that is a preference rather than a fault. An installation date driven by a lease or a building handover is treated as fixed, and we plan backwards from it.
Office moves and what goes wrong in them
- The internet line is ordered too late A new line can take weeks and is not something any supplier can hurry. It is the first order, not the last.
- Nobody surveyed the new building So the cabling plan arrives after the walls have gone up.
- The old building is given up too early An overlap of a week or two costs little and saves the move.
- Equipment is assumed to be reusable Some of it is. The pieces past their support date are not worth carrying.
- The cutover is planned for a Monday It should be planned for a Friday evening, so there is a weekend to correct anything.
Wireless in a building that fights you
Older buildings in London are the hardest part of this work. Solid brick, lath and plaster with wire mesh behind it, lift shafts, steel beams and rooms that were added later all absorb or reflect signal in ways a floor plan does not show.
The common mistake is to answer a coverage complaint by adding another access point. Two access points fighting each other produce a worse result than one placed properly, because devices keep switching between them mid call.
What works instead is measurement. We walk the building with the equipment on, record the signal in the rooms people actually use, and place the access points from that rather than from the ceiling grid. Where a room cannot be covered from outside it, we cable to it, which is usually cheaper than the two extra access points that would not have fixed it.
We also check what else is using the same frequencies. A neighbouring office, a microwave, a wireless camera or a badly configured printer can be the whole explanation for a corner that has never worked.
What good looks like
Nobody in your team mentions the network. Wireless works in every room people use, including the difficult corner. Guests connect without being able to see anything of yours. A fault can be located from the label on the cable. And when a switch has to be replaced, it appears in a budget six months in advance rather than on the morning it fails.
Related services
The network is what everything else runs on, so this work tends to arrive alongside one of the pieces below, particularly during a move or a cloud migration.
Where equipment you already own is fit for the job, we keep it and say so.
- Cybersecurity for the firewall rules, wireless separation and remote access
- Cloud and Azure because a cloud move raises the value of the connection
- Projects and consultancy for an office move or a site relocation
- Managed IT to have the network monitored and kept current
- IT support for the day to day faults your team reports
Articles and news on networks and infrastructure
Notes on cabling, wireless and office moves, written for the person who has to sign off the cost.
The first hour after a suspected email compromise
What to do, in order, when you think somebody has got into a mailbox. Written to be followed by whoever is in the office at the time.
Read the articleThe five security controls worth putting in place first
Security spending often starts at the wrong end. These five controls remove the largest share of everyday risk and cost the least.
Read the articleTurning on multi factor authentication without stopping work
The single change that prevents most account takeovers, and how to introduce it across a team of thirty people in a fortnight.
Read the articleTalk to us about your network
Tell us what is going wrong, or the date you have to be in a new building. We will survey it and come back with a design, a cost and what we would keep from what you already own.
If you have a move date, tell us in the first line.