Network & data center services

Network Design Services

A network design is the document that makes everything after it predictable: what the topology is, how many ports and how much power each closet has to carry, where the wireless has to hold up, and the bill of materials that follows from all three.

We design against your building rather than a reference diagram, and the same document is what gets quoted.

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Deliverables: Topology · closet-by-closet BOM · rack elevations · coverage plan
Covers: Switching, routing, wireless and the cabling and power behind them
Design order: Requirements and survey first, model numbers last
Boundary: Equipment design and BOM — addressing and policy stay yours

Tell us the project — Network design

Tell us where to reach you and a Uniqcli specialist follows up by email to scope the work with you — what has to be covered, how many sites or buildings, and what already exists — then comes back with a quoted bill of materials across the equipment, the software licensing and the deployment work.

Priced against your own site rather than a package tier, sourced through authorized US distribution and screened line by line. We specify, supply, stage and integrate; internet access is scoped separately from the equipment on this page, and operating the network stays with your team or the provider you contract.

The first number is our real one, not an opening one.

Tell us the scope and we come back with the best price we can do on it.

Supporting federal, state & local purchasers
GPC & P-Card accepted
TAA & NDAA-889 screening before every quote

Live catalog prices for in-stock hardware, shown as a starting point — your quote is scoped to the site and includes the licensing and services the job needs.

Overview

A design is a bill of materials with the reasons still attached

Most network projects that overrun did not overrun on the switch. They overran on what the switch implied and nobody wrote down: the uplink optics needed at both ends, the power budget the cameras and access points had quietly consumed, the closet with no spare rack units, the run that turned out to be longer than the standard allows.

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Network design services exist to catch that on paper, where a mistake is an edit rather than a change order. We work it in the order the money actually falls — requirements and constraints first, then topology, then the physical realities of closets, power and pathways, and only then model numbers — and hand back a topology drawing, a set of rack elevations and a line-by-line bill of materials a purchasing office can act on. The design is the front of a quoted build rather than a separate consulting exercise: it names what to buy, and the same document is what we price, source and stage.

What a design produces

Four documents, not one drawing

A design that is only a picture of boxes and lines leaves the expensive half of the project undefined. These four travel together, and each one is written so somebody who was not in the room can act on it.

Requirements and constraints, in writing

Wired and wireless device counts by type, the applications that set the performance floor, the growth you already know about, the downtime windows you are allowed, and the standards your organization has to meet.

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Most of the disagreement in a network project is really a disagreement about this list, discovered late. Writing it down first is the cheapest thing a design engagement produces.

Topology and the layer above the closet

Access, aggregation and core — or a collapsed core, where that is the honest answer for the size of the site. Uplink media and distance, the redundancy you are paying for and the failure it actually covers, and the boundary where switching becomes routing.

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Segmentation intent is recorded here as your requirement so the hardware chosen can carry it.

The physical design — racks, power, pathways

Rack elevations with usable units counted rather than assumed, power draw per rack against the circuits and protection feeding it, heat that has to leave a closet with no ventilation, patch field layout and cable pathways.

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This is the section that decides whether install day is straightforward, and it is the section most often skipped.

The bill of materials itself

Switches, optics at both ends, stacking cables, patch cords cut to a real length, rails, blanking panels, power distribution and spares — plus any licensing with its term written beside it.

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Availability is stated per line rather than implied, so the long-lead items are identified while the schedule can still absorb them.

Send the site and get a design back

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Campus network design

Campus network design starts at the closet, not at the core

A campus is rarely one network. It is a set of buildings from different construction eras, joined by whatever fiber was pulled at the time, running equipment bought under several different standards. Campus network design work therefore begins with an inventory rather than an architecture: ports installed against ports actually in use, the power class of what is plugged in today, the strand count and type in each inter-building path, and the rack space and circuits available in the rooms that would have to hold anything new. Almost every constraint that decides the design is already sitting in the buildings.

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The inter-building layer is where a campus design earns its keep. Fiber strand availability and type set the transceiver choice and therefore the uplink speed you can reach without trenching; distance sets the optic class; the number of usable paths sets whether redundancy is a design property or a hope. Where a path does not exist and a trench is not viable, a surveyed outdoor wireless link is often what makes the connection affordable at all, and it belongs in the design rather than arriving later as a surprise.

Growth is the last thing written and the first thing to invalidate a design. Multi-gigabit access ports only earn their price where the endpoints can use them; higher-power PoE needs both a supply and a budget behind it; and adding a dozen devices in year two can cross a licensing band boundary that costs more than the devices did. We size against the count you are planning for, name the phase-two additions in the document, and say plainly which decisions are reversible and which are not.

Wireless network design

Wireless network design is a coverage and capacity exercise

Access point count is an output, not an input. Wireless network design work is deciding which of two different problems a space actually has, and then designing for that one.

Coverage or capacity — decide which you have

A warehouse with scanners at the far end of an aisle is a coverage problem: signal has to reach, through racking that changes when the slotting changes.

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A lecture hall or a conference floor is a capacity problem: everyone is already in range and the design question is how many radios share the load. The two produce different placements from the same floor plan, and a design that does not say which one it solved is guessing.

Placement, mounting and the ceiling you actually have

Mounting height, ceiling construction, sprinkler and duct routes, and whether an installer can reach a position at all decide as much as the radio does.

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Outdoor and high-bay positions add enclosures, mounts and a power path that frequently is not there. Placements are chosen against the building rather than a uniform grid dropped over the plan.

The switch behind the access point

Every access point is a powered port on a switch, and a wireless design that ignores the closet produces a power budget nobody checked. The design counts the powered ports needed, the class each device draws, the headroom left for the phase-two positions, and whether the existing switch can supply it — which is often where a wireless project turns into a switching line item.

What's included

What's included in a network design engagement

A design that is only a picture of boxes and lines leaves the expensive half of the project undefined — so four documents come back, not one drawing.

Requirements and constraints in writing — device counts by type, the applications that set the performance floor, the growth you already know about, the downtime windows you are allowed and the standards you have to meet
Topology: access, aggregation and core — or a collapsed core, where that is the honest answer for the size of the site
Rack elevations with usable units counted rather than assumed, power draw per rack against the circuits and protection feeding it, and the heat that has to leave a closet with no ventilation
Closet-by-closet port and power counts, uplink media and the patch fields behind them
A wireless coverage and capacity plan, with placement and mounting against the ceiling the building actually has
The bill of materials itself — switches, optics at both ends, stacking cables, patch cords cut to a real length, rails, blanking panels, power distribution and spares, plus any licensing with its term beside it
A refresh sequence with a bill of materials per phase, so each phase can be requisitioned on its own and leaves a working network behind it

How it runs

From a requirements conversation to a quotable design

Nothing here needs to be complete before you start. A floor plan and a closet list is enough to begin, and the gaps get filled as the design is worked.

Send what exists — floor plans, a closet list, current models, any port-utilization export, and the standards you have to meet
Requirements and constraints are captured in writing: device counts and classes, applications, growth, downtime windows
Topology, closet-by-closet port and power counts, uplink media and rack elevations come back as a design document
Every line the design calls for becomes a bill of materials with availability stated per line, long-lead items flagged
TAA (FAR 52.225-5) and NDAA §889 screening is performed on every line before the quote goes out, with alternates where a line does not clear
The design is yours to keep — implement it with your own team, your integrator, or hand it back to us to source and stage

Refresh planning

Designing a refresh you can actually fund in phases

Very few organizations replace an access layer in one purchase, and a design that assumes they will is not usable. Refresh planning is the part of the work that decides the order: which closets are out of support and therefore an exposure rather than merely old, which have run out of ports or power, which are fine for another budget cycle, and what has to be bought once so that the later phases do not need it bought twice. Uplink media and the aggregation layer usually belong in phase one for exactly that reason.

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Phasing also protects the parts of a build that are cheap now and expensive later. Cable pathway, rack space, power provisioning and the fiber count between buildings are all far cheaper to oversize during a phase already underway than to revisit. Where the design recommends buying capacity ahead of need, it says so explicitly and says what it costs, rather than folding it into a total.

The output of refresh planning is a sequence with a bill of materials per phase, so each phase can be requisitioned on its own and each one leaves a working network behind it. Nothing in the sequence assumes a later phase is funded.

Have the design done before the quote is written

Send a floor plan and a closet list and a specialist will work the design with you. What comes back is a topology, rack elevations and a bill of materials with availability stated per line — the document you would need whether you buy the hardware from us or not.

Start a network design Network installation services

Limits

What a design engagement does not include

We design the equipment and the physical plant that carries it. The addressing plan, the VLAN and routing policy, the firewall rule set and the security architecture are your network owner's to author — we specify hardware that can implement them, record the segmentation intent as a requirement, and stage that configuration onto the hardware once your team supplies it. A design document from us is a specification your engineers or your integrator implement, not an authority over how your network is run.

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We do not operate the network after handover. There is no monitoring centre and no network operations desk on our side, and we make no uptime or availability commitment on a network we do not run. The internet access or transport a design depends on is a separate scope with its own quote rather than something folded into the design. What we supply is the design, the equipment, the licensing and the integration work that puts them into service, handed over with documentation.

Where a design touches the building itself — pathways, penetrations, conduit, or a cable plant that has to be pulled — the jurisdiction-specific licensing and permitting for that site are confirmed during the survey rather than assumed, and code compliance is determined by the authority having jurisdiction rather than asserted by a supplier.

The lanes either side of a design

A design is rarely the whole job. These are the adjacent lanes most often scoped on the same conversation.

Network installation services IT infrastructure services Network switch refresh Business Wi-Fi Wi-Fi site surveys Structured cabling services PoE network infrastructure Branch office IT standardization

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Questions

Network design questions

What do network design services actually deliver?

A topology drawing, a closet-by-closet count of ports and powered devices with the power budget behind them, rack elevations, uplink media and distances, a wireless coverage plan where wireless is in scope, and a bill of materials with availability stated per line. The requirements and constraints the design answers are written down alongside it, so a decision made in week one is still legible in month six.

How is campus network design different from designing a single building?

The between-buildings layer changes the problem. In one building the constraints are closets, pathways and power; across a campus the fiber strand count and type in each path, the distance, and how many usable paths exist decide the uplink speed and the redundancy you can reach without trenching. Campus designs also inherit mixed equipment generations, so the useful question is which buildings have to change first rather than what replaces everything.

Can you do wireless network design from floor plans alone?

A plan-based design is a reasonable starting point for budgeting and for spaces with predictable construction, and it is often how a project begins. It is not a substitute for measuring a building whose materials, racking or occupancy you cannot see on paper — warehouses, older construction and high-density spaces are the usual cases. We will say which one your site is rather than presenting a desk exercise as a survey.

Do you design our addressing and security policy too?

No. The addressing plan, VLAN and routing policy, firewall rules and the security architecture stay with your network owner or the integrator you contract. We design the equipment and physical plant that implements them, record your segmentation and performance requirements in the document, and can stage hardware with the configuration your team supplies before it ships.

How does a design turn into a purchase?

The bill of materials the design produces is quoted line by line, with availability stated per line and long-lead items identified early. GPC / P-Card is accepted up to your cardholder threshold and purchase orders otherwise, with stock and the final total confirmed before you commit. If you would rather implement the design with another supplier, the document is still yours.

Is the equipment screened before it is quoted?

Yes, and on a design engagement the sequence is worth being exact about, because the drawing comes first. A design document that names a product is not itself a screened document — the screen runs when that bill of materials is quoted, where manufacturer-stated country of origin is recorded per line for TAA (FAR 52.225-5) and each maker with its parent and affiliates is checked against the NDAA §889 covered-entity list. So if the requirement is TAA-restricted, say so at design time rather than at quote time: it is a constraint on what gets specified in the first place, and it is far cheaper to honour in a drawing than to unwind in a finished bill of materials. The determination on your award stays with your contracting officer.

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“Network Design Services”

Send the site and get a design back

Floor plans, a closet list and the standards you have to meet are enough to start. What comes back is a topology, rack elevations and a bill of materials with availability stated per line — screened before it is quoted.

Start a network design Build a bill of materials