Network Design & Multi-Site Engineering

Network design that survives the next three moves — and the next three buildings

Most networks are not designed — they accumulate. A switch added here, an access point zip-tied to a beam there, a firewall installed by the cable company on day one and never touched again. That works until the business outgrows it and the next moves cost ten times what a real design would have. We design networks for what your business actually does today, what it will do in three years, and what happens when something fails at 2 a.m.

What we design

Single-office and multi-floor offices — most of our work. 25 to 250 endpoints, one or two floors, one ISP or dual-WAN with failover. Site survey, equipment selection, IP plan, VLANs, firewall rules, Wi-Fi heat map, and a written cutover plan. Typical engagement runs 2 to 6 weeks of design and a single weekend of cutover.

Multi-building campuses — our scaling discipline. Hospitals, college and school district campuses, multi-tenant office portfolios, distribution centers, and public housing properties. Inter-building fiber pathways (single-mode OS2 over conduit, sometimes aerial where buildings are owned by the same authority), building-level LAN aggregation, centralized firewall and management, scaled IP plan that handles dozens of subnets cleanly, physical security for the network plant in each building, and a 24/7 monitoring strategy that does not blow up when one building loses connectivity.

Multi-site and multi-property rollouts — restaurant groups, retail chains, healthcare practice groups, public housing portfolios, and franchised operations. Standardized site templates so the eighth location deploys identically to the first. Centralized firewall and SD-WAN posture, configuration version control, and a documentation system that keeps every site current.

Campus surveillance backbones — networks designed specifically to carry IP camera traffic at scale. PoE+ and PoE++ switching, multicast and bandwidth segmentation, NVR storage architecture, redundant pathways. We are currently engaged on a 28-building residential campus design integrating IP camera coverage and the network backbone that supports it. See the security cameras service page for the camera-system side.

Retrofits and redesigns — when an existing network has accumulated problems and the cleanest path forward is a redesign rather than another patch. Phased migration, staged cutover, no business-hour disruption.

Acquisitions and integrations — when you acquire a company and need to integrate two networks. Domain unification, identity merge, IP plan reconciliation, security policy normalization.

What “design” actually includes

Site survey with bandwidth requirements, building materials, and existing-state assessment. WAN architecture — single ISP, dual ISP with active-active or failover, SD-WAN where it pays back. LAN architecture — core, distribution, and access tiers where the scale justifies it; flat where it doesn’t. Wi-Fi heat-mapping with real measurements using Ekahau or NetAlly AirMagnet, not vendor predictive tools that lie about coverage. VLAN and segmentation design appropriate to the business — guest, IoT, point-of-sale, voice, video, surveillance, management — with documented inter-VLAN routing and ACLs. Firewall rules that enforce least privilege without becoming unmanageable spaghetti. Naming, labeling, and IP plan that the next engineer can pick up cold. Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, and on-prem AD integration. As-built drawings delivered as PDF, editable Visio, and Lucidchart-compatible.

When you need a network designer

You are moving into a new space and the cabling and network are blank slate. You acquired a company and need to integrate two networks. Your current network has accumulated problems and the easier path forward is a redesign rather than another patch. You are about to deploy 20 or more access points, multiple VoIP phones per desk, AV-over-IP, or a video-heavy contact center and the existing infrastructure cannot support it. You operate across multiple buildings or sites and have decided you would rather have one designed system than seven accumulated ones. You are planning a deployment with strict uptime, compliance, or audit requirements (HIPAA, PCI-DSS, NY SHIELD Act, public sector).

Vendor independence

We design with the right tool for the environment, not the logo on our partner certificate. Common selections:

Firewalls and edge — Cisco Meraki for centralized cloud management; Fortinet FortiGate for security-heavy environments; SonicWall for cost-sensitive SMB; Palo Alto for enterprise-grade requirements; Ubiquiti UniFi Gateway for IT-savvy clients who want capable hardware without recurring license fees.

Switching — Cisco Catalyst, Meraki MS, Aruba, Fortinet FortiSwitch, Ubiquiti UniFi, Netgear AV, Dell. Multi-gig and 10G uplinks where the access density justifies it.

Wi-Fi — Cisco Meraki, Aruba, Ruckus, Ubiquiti, EnGenius, TP-Link Omada. Wi-Fi 6, 6E, or 7 chosen on use case rather than spec sheets.

Cabling and pathway — designed alongside the network architecture. See the structured cabling page for the full low-voltage stack.

What it costs

Project-priced based on scope — driven by site count, square footage, building count for campus work, survey complexity, and how much existing-state documentation we have to start with. We quote the design as a fixed-fee deliverable so you know what you are paying before we start; the design package is yours regardless of who installs it. Request a written quote and we will scope it after a site walk.

From the field

Pair with cabling and managed IT

For our managed-services clients we deliver design-build — the design plus the cabling, the install, the configuration, and the post-go-live support all under one accountable team. See Design-Build Infrastructure for the integrated offering.