Networking a Bristol co-working & events venue from the ground up

We were brought in from the ground up to design, supply and install the entire network infrastructure.

At the core sits an enterprise-grade firewall and a business-class network switch, giving the venue the same level of protection and reliability you'd expect in a corporate head office, not just a shared workspace. Wireless coverage throughout the building is handled by a mesh of professional-grade access points, tuned to cope with dozens of simultaneous devices without the congestion that cheaper, consumer-grade kit typically suffers from.

The real design challenge was separation. Every distinct area of the venue — the co-working floor, the meeting rooms, the audio-visual systems, and the café — sits on its own isolated network segment (VLAN). This means a problem or security issue in one part of the building, say the public café Wi-Fi, has no way of reaching the business systems or the private networks used by paying members and their equipment.

For visitors and guests, we set up a branded Wi-Fi login page with voucher-code access, giving the venue full control over who connects and for how long, without ever exposing the underlying business network.