A private office network inside a serviced building

You rent the office. You don’t rent the network.

An investment management firm, with its head office overseas, was opening its first London office. The building was a serviced one — the landlord supplies the Wi-Fi, runs a shared comms room, and gives each tenant a floor port to patch into. For a lot of tenants that arrangement is fine.

For a firm handling client money, sharing a wireless network with every other office in the block is not fine. So the brief we were given was specific. If we put our own router and access points on one of the ethernet sockets, can we create our own network, with a range of IP addresses separate to the other offices in the building? And can it be a normal Wi-Fi with our own name and passwords, rather than an enterprise sign-in?

Nobody can answer that honestly from a desk. It depends entirely on what the landlord has already installed, and on what they will allow a tenant to plug into it.

The survey came before the shopping list

The firm asked us to attend as their IT company and find out. In their own words, the point of the visit was to get an understanding of the existing infrastructure they would have to plug themselves into, so we could then advise on the best configuration and what hardware to buy.

• On site with the building’s general manager. Our team went through the landlord’s existing infrastructure, the shared comms room and the floor ports in the suite, and established what was actually there.
• Established the boundaries. What can and cannot be done inside a shared building is not a matter of opinion. The building’s own IT confirmed the approach in principle — patch in the floor port the tenant’s equipment sits behind, and provide public IP details as normal.
• Then, and only then, specified kit. With the survey done, we advised on the configuration and told the firm what to buy: a router and access points running off the patched floor port, their own public IP details, their own SSID and passwords.
• Set the office up. New devices and the office printer were configured over the visits that followed.

What the firm ended up with

A private, segregated network in a building it shares with strangers. Its traffic on its own IP range instead of the landlord’s shared Wi-Fi. A wireless name and password the firm controls and can change without asking anybody. And a hardware list chosen against what the building could genuinely support.

The job ran to roughly ten hours of chargeable time across four attendances, plus remote work between them. That is what a first office setup costs when the survey comes first — and far less than buying equipment that turns out not to fit the building.

A note on this case study

The client is anonymised, but the job is real and it was delivered by our team. Moving into a new office is the moment to get this right, which is why network setup and business Wi-Fi sit alongside our IT relocation work. Once the network exists, device deployment is the easy part.