Three-school federation cabling refresh during summer break

The challenge

Three primary schools shared a tired CAT5e network with intermittent dropouts. The IT lead needed a complete refresh — every classroom, every staff room, every IT suite — finished before the September term, with no leftover snags. The schools shared a single IT team across the federation, so any handover work had to be self-explanatory.

The solution

We surveyed all three sites in parallel during the final week of summer term, locked the schedule, and committed to a fixed-price quote. Phase one was structured CAT6 to every teaching space; phase two was fibre uplinks between site MDFs and the central federation comms room. We worked from 7am to 7pm Monday–Saturday across all three sites, with the same labelling scheme and patch panel layout at each site so the IT team could service any of them with the same documentation pack.

Outcomes

• All three schools went live on day one of term — no carryover snags
• 4× headroom on bandwidth (1 Gbps to every desk vs. 100 Mbps before)
• Standardised labelling across sites cut the IT team's mean-time-to-resolve in half
• 25-year warranty + Fluke certification per port