Business Wi-Fi in Whitby, for offices and for handhelds
Whitby's employment lands include automated warehousing. A warehouse management system on handhelds is a completely different Wi-Fi problem from twelve people in an office, and one design does not cover both.
At a glance
- On site in Whitby and across Durham Region
- Mon–Fri 8am–5pm, after hours by arrangement
- One number to call, no vendor hand-offs
- Quoted per site. We will tell you what you do not need.
What Whitby is, in the parts that affect this work
Whitby is two working towns wearing one name. South of the 401 you have Port Whitby and the Whitby Business Park: established industrial stock, some of it decades into its second or third tenant. North at the 407 and Baldwin interchange, Brooklin Gate is still being built.
This page is about what that means for business wi-fi specifically. For how the work itself runs, what is included and what it costs to scope, the Business Wi-Fi & Mesh page is the one to read.
If the business runs on handhelds, coverage is not the goal
A barcode scanner or a warehouse management terminal is a small radio with a small antenna, held by somebody walking. It does not behave like a laptop on a desk. It roams constantly, it clings to a weak access point long past the point of usefulness, and when it drops a scan the operator does not get an error message, they get a scan that did not happen.
Designing for this means overlapping coverage tuned so devices hand off cleanly, transmit power turned down rather than up, and the slowest legacy data rates disabled so a device cannot cling to an access point three aisles away. That last change fixes more warehouse Wi-Fi complaints than adding hardware does.
Glass partitions look modern and behave like walls
The newer office fit-outs in Brooklin and along the 401 corridor lean on glass partitions and open plan. Glass is not the transparent material for radio that it is for light, particularly the coated and laminated glass used in commercial partitions, and a metal-framed glass wall reflects signal in ways that create dead spots in the middle of an open room.
This is why a floor plan is not a Wi-Fi design. We would rather walk the space with a meter for an hour than guess from a drawing, and on a fit-out that has not been built yet we design conservatively and re-check after the partitions go in.
The thing that is usually actually wrong
In most Whitby offices we are called to, the access points are fine and one of these is the problem: every access point is on the same channel and they are jamming each other, the internet connection upstream is saturated and Wi-Fi is being blamed for it, or there is a consumer router doing double duty as a firewall and running out of memory by mid-afternoon.
None of those are fixed by buying more access points, which is what gets sold. We check upstream before we quote hardware.
Getting to you in Whitby
Whitby is close enough to our Oshawa base that no regional travel charge applies. Mobilisation still does on an install, because a van has to be loaded whether the site is next door or an hour away, and it appears as its own line rather than buried in the hourly rate.
We are a service-area business based in Oshawa with no storefront, so every job happens at your premises. If your site sits at the edge of what we cover, we would rather say so on the phone than find out on the day.
Want this scoped for your site in Whitby?
Tell us the building and what you are trying to achieve. We will tell you what it takes, and whether you actually need it.
Before you call
Should we survey before or after the racking goes in?
After, if the racking is going to be full. Loaded racking absorbs and reflects signal in a way empty racking does not, and a survey of an empty warehouse produces a design that stops working on the day you fill it. If you need a design before then, we design for the loaded state and verify afterwards.
Can we run guest Wi-Fi on the same equipment?
Yes, on a separate network with its own rules, so a guest device cannot see your file server and a guest downloading something large cannot starve your point-of-sale terminal. Doing this properly costs nothing extra in hardware. Doing it improperly is one of the more common ways a small business gets into trouble.
Do we need cabling done before Wi-Fi?
Every access point needs a cable. Wireless describes the last few metres to the device, not the link back to the switch, and an access point on a long improvised cable run is the most common cause of Wi-Fi that works in the morning and not in the afternoon.