Network cabling in Ajax, with nowhere to hide a cable
In an office you run cable above the tile and nobody sees it. In an Ajax distribution building there is no tile, no void and no ceiling. Everything you install is visible, reachable only by lift, and has to survive a forklift.
At a glance
- On site in Ajax and across Durham Region
- Mon–Fri 8am–5pm, after hours by arrangement
- Labelled and continuity tested as standard
- Quoted per site. We will tell you what you do not need.
What Ajax is, in the parts that affect this work
The Ajax employment lands run to big-box logistics. Buildings in the GTA East Industrial Park off Salem Road North are specified with 40-foot clear height and truck-level doors, which is a warehouse built for vertical racking rather than for people at desks.
This page is about what that means for network cabling specifically. For how the work itself runs, what is included and what it costs to scope, the Structured Cabling page is the one to read.
Ninety metres is a real limit and a 40-foot building eats it fast
Copper Ethernet has a hard working limit of 100 metres from switch port to device, of which 90 metres is the fixed horizontal run and the rest is patch leads at each end. In an office that limit is generous. In a warehouse the cable does not travel in a straight line: it goes up 40 feet to the tray, along the building, and back down, and that vertical is spent twice before you have covered any floor.
Which is why the important decision on an Ajax warehouse is not the cable, it is where the communications rooms go. One rack in the office at the front cannot reach the far dock doors. Two or three properly placed distribution points, linked back to the main room with fiber, cost less than the failed troubleshooting on an over-length run that works in January and drops packets in July.
An over-length run is the worst kind of fault because it usually passes a basic continuity check and only misbehaves under load and heat. If a consultant tells you a run is fine because the light came on, they tested for the wrong thing.
Everything is exposed, so mechanical protection is the job
Cable in a warehouse is installed in tray or conduit, not stapled to steel, because it has to survive being near a forklift mast, a pallet being placed badly, and the vibration of a dock door cycling several hundred times a week.
Drop cables to a scanner charging station or a label printer are the ones that get damaged, because they are at working height. We armour or conduit those runs to about eight feet as standard. It is not expensive and it is the difference between a cable plant that lasts a decade and one that produces a service call every few months.
Where cable crosses a fire separation, the penetration has to be firestopped properly. This is not optional and it is one of the things an insurer's inspector actually looks at. A neat cable plant with an unsealed sleeve through a fire wall is a failed inspection.
Fiber earlier than you would expect
In a building this size, the links between distribution points should be fiber rather than copper: no distance limit worth worrying about, no electrical path between buildings or between distant parts of a steel structure, and headroom for whatever the network needs in ten years.
This is the one place we will push you to spend slightly more than you planned. Pulling a fiber backbone while the tray is being installed is a small addition. Adding it afterwards means the lift, the traffic control and the shutdown all over again.
Getting to you in Ajax
Ajax sits inside our regional travel band. That is one flat charge per site visit, not per hour and not per technician, and it is on the quote as its own line before you agree to anything. If a job needs three visits you will see three of them, which is also why we would rather scope it properly once.
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 Ajax?
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
Do you need the warehouse shut down?
Rarely all of it. We work in sections and coordinate around your traffic, because a lift under a live aisle is a safety problem for both of us. Most Ajax jobs we run either on an off shift or aisle by aisle with the aisle closed. We will tell you which we need at quoting stage, not on the day.
Who provides the lift?
We can bring one or work off yours if you have a suitable unit and an operator ticket on site. Using yours is usually cheaper and worth asking about. We will not operate equipment we are not certified for, and we will say so rather than improvise.
Can you cable the office fit-out at the same time?
Yes, and it is cheaper as one job. The office and the warehouse are different work with different materials, but they share a mobilisation, a rack and a single set of test results. Splitting them across two visits means paying to arrive twice.