Network equipment and structured cabling, installed to a standard

An unmanaged switch simply forwards traffic and cannot be configured; a managed switch lets you create VLANs, control port behaviour, monitor traffic and diagnose faults remotely. For an office of under about ten people with no guest network and no surveillance on the same infrastructure, unmanaged is genuinely adequate and we will say so. The moment you need to separate guest WiFi from business systems, put cameras on the network, or diagnose a problem without physically visiting the rack, managed becomes worth the difference — which on modern hardware is smaller than most people expect.

The cable itself is a modest premium; the labour to pull it is identical, and the labour is the larger cost. Since you are paying an engineer to run cable through walls and containment either way, specifying Cat6 costs relatively little extra and gives you headroom for multi-gigabit equipment later. Where we would push harder for Cat6A is anywhere you expect high-density wireless or cameras on longer runs. What we would not do is re-pull existing serviceable Cat5e purely for the specification — if it certifies at gigabit and your equipment is gigabit, it is doing its job.

Density, not floor area, is what drives the answer. A calculator based on square metres will consistently under-specify for Pakistani buildings, because load-bearing brick and reinforced concrete attenuate signal far more than the drywall those models assume. As a rough starting point we plan one access point per twenty to twenty-five concurrent users in an office environment, then adjust for wall construction and for rooms where reliability genuinely matters — a boardroom or an exam hall. For anything above a single floor we would rather do a short site survey than guess.

We test first and tell you what we find. Existing cabling that certifies to category standard is worth keeping, and we will happily build on it. What we frequently find in older Pakistani installations is a mix — some runs perfectly sound, others terminated poorly, kinked in containment, or run alongside mains cable in a way that induces interference. We will give you the per-run certification results and a costed list of only the runs that genuinely need redoing, rather than quoting a full replacement by default.

No — we install and configure the network inside your building, and the internet service comes from your ISP. What we do is design the edge so the connection you have is used properly: correct router configuration, secondary uplink failover where uptime matters, and quality-of-service rules so a large file transfer does not take down your video calls. We will also tell you frankly if the bottleneck you are experiencing is your internal network or your ISP link, which is a distinction that saves organisations a lot of money spent on the wrong problem.