Infrastructure

Multi-Site Network & Cabling

Structured Cat6A cabling and managed switching across 3 retail sites, with SD-WAN failover ensuring each location stays online even if a primary circuit drops.

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Sector
Retail
Sites
3 Locations
Duration
6 Days
Cabling
Cat6A Throughout
3Sites
10GbBackbone
Cat6ACabling
99.9%Uptime SLA

The Brief

A retail group with three high-street locations was running each site on consumer-grade routers with no failover. When a circuit went down at the busiest site during a Saturday trading period, they lost card payment capability for two hours. They needed a proper managed network across all three sites — reliable, consistent and centrally visible.

Our Approach

We surveyed all three sites and designed a unified network architecture: structured Cat6A cabling to every desk and PoE device, managed switches in each site's comms room, and SD-WAN routers providing automatic failover between the primary fibre and a 4G backup circuit. All three sites are managed from a single cloud dashboard.

What We Installed

  • Cat6A structured cabling throughout all 3 sites (180 runs total)
  • 24-port managed PoE switches per site
  • SD-WAN routers with 4G failover at each location
  • 10Gb fibre backbone between floors at head site
  • Rack installation, patch panel labelling and full documentation
  • Cloud network management platform with alerting
  • Wi-Fi 6 access points (12 total across all sites)

"Since DARKGRID installed the new network we've had zero unplanned downtime — and when our ISP had an outage, the 4G failover kicked in automatically and we didn't even notice until they told us the next day."

— IT Manager, Retail Group

The Result

All three sites were migrated over a series of Sunday mornings to avoid trading disruption. From the day of go-live, each site has maintained the target 99.9% uptime — the SD-WAN failover has already triggered twice during ISP outages, both times transparently.

The central management dashboard means the client's IT contact can now see the health of every switch and access point across all three sites from one screen.

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