Cabling and switching designed first
Structured cabling planned against the rack layout and the door and camera positions, so the network was designed around how the building would actually be used rather than retrofitted once the shelving went in.
Infrastructure design & build
Designing a warehouse from empty building to working floor
A new facility with nothing in it. We designed and built the lot: structured cabling, switching and routing, WiFi that survives steel racking, camera coverage, and door access on the same platform.
Warehouse & distribution · Alberta · anonymised at the client's request
The situation
What we walked into
A greenfield warehouse. No cabling, no network, no coverage, no cameras, no access control — and an operational date that was not moving.
Warehouses break the assumptions office WiFi is designed around. Steel racking is RF-hostile, stock height changes the radio environment as the building fills, and forklifts move metal through the space all day.
Handheld scanners have to roam across the floor without dropping a session mid-pick, which is a stricter requirement than laptops browsing the web.
Cameras, door access and corporate traffic all needed to coexist on one physical network without sharing a broadcast domain.
The work
What we built
WiFi designed for racking, not for offices
Access point placement worked out for a racked environment — coverage down aisles rather than across open floor, allowing for the racking filling with stock, and tuned so scanners roam cleanly between APs instead of clinging to a distant one.
Cameras and door access on one platform
UniFi Protect for surveillance and UniFi Access for doors, on the same Ubiquiti stack as the network. One console, one set of credentials to manage, and no third-party access control box nobody remembers how to administer.
Segmented from the start
VLANs separating cameras, door access, corporate devices, scanners and guest traffic. Cameras and access controllers are the classic soft target on a flat network; here they never share a segment with anything that matters.
The outcome
Where it landed
- A working floor from day one: network, WiFi, cameras and doors all live for the operational date.
- Scanner coverage that holds across the racking as the building fills with stock.
- One vendor stack and one console, so the team is not administering four unrelated systems.
- Segmentation designed in rather than added after an incident.
Got something shaped like this?
Most of this work starts the same way — finding out what is actually running before anyone proposes a fix.