Mesh Wi-Fi and a business email move for a garden design studio

The enquiry

A garden and landscape designer runs a one-person studio from a home office. Planting plans, client presentations, site photographs and video calls all travel over one domestic broadband line, and the wireless signal was not reaching every part of the house she works from. She wrote asking for advice and a quote for installation, and mentioned her broadband speed in passing: around 100.

Why we phoned before we priced anything

That number did not sound right to the engineer who read it. One figure for a broadband line usually means the download speed has been noted and the upload speed has not — and upload is what carries a video call and a set of drawings out of the house. Rather than size up hardware against it, he rang her and asked her to test again.

She had made a mistake, and said so herself: “Your engineer called me and asked me to check the upload speed as it didn’t sound right. I have done so and I made a mistake in my email, it’s actually 130/30 which I believe is a normal ratio.”

That was a short phone call before any money changed hands. It matters because the usual order of events is the other way round — kit first, questions later. Equipment quoted against a number nobody has verified can easily be equipment that was never going to fix the problem.

The install, and the kit she bought herself

With the line properly understood, the issue was coverage rather than raw speed. Our team specified a TP-Link Deco X55 mesh set, told her exactly which set to order so she paid the retail price rather than a marked-up one, and then installed and configured it around the house.

A second job, months later

The following summer she came back for something unrelated: getting her business email onto her own domain instead of a generic address. That took a call to scope it, two visits, the migration itself and a remote follow-up. Before signing it off, we sent a message through the new mailbox and confirmed it arrived.

What she wrote at the end was brief: “I’ve just paid your invoice. Many thanks for your help with this.” That is a thank-you rather than a claim about results, and we would rather quote it as it was written than dress it up as something else.

About this story

The client is anonymised out of respect for her privacy, but both jobs are real and both were delivered by our team. A home office is a small setting, and we have written this at the size it was: one install, then a handful of short sessions. Improving coverage in a house someone works from is everyday Wi-Fi setup and wireless network work for us, and putting a sole trader on their own domain is straightforward business email setup. Neither job was large. Both were worth doing carefully.