Network cabling in Ajax
Ajax has two very different kinds of commercial building. Along the 401 there are offices and storefront units with a ceiling to hide cable in. In the employment lands further north there are high-bay warehouses with no ceiling at all. We cable both, from a handful of added drops to a full fit-out, and come in from our base in Oshawa to do it.
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 warehouse eats it fast
Copper Ethernet has a working limit of 100 metres from switch port to device: 90 metres of fixed horizontal run plus patch leads at each end. In an office that is generous. In a warehouse the cable climbs 40 feet to the tray, runs along the building and drops back down, and that vertical is spent twice before it has covered any floor.
So the important decision on an Ajax warehouse is where the communications rooms go, not which cable to buy. One rack in the front office cannot reach the far dock doors. Two or three distribution points, linked back to the main room with fiber, cost less than chasing faults on an over-length run.
An over-length run can pass a wire-map test and still drop packets under load, because a wire map proves the pairs are landed correctly, not that the run will carry full speed over its length. That is why run lengths get designed at the survey rather than discovered at hand-over.
In a warehouse, protecting the cable is most of the job
There is no ceiling void to hide cable in, so everything goes in tray or conduit where it can survive a forklift mast, a badly placed pallet and a dock door cycling hundreds of times a week. Drops at working height, to a scanner charging station or a label printer, are the ones that get hit. Running them in conduit or armoured cable up to about eight feet costs little next to a repeat service call.
Where cable passes through a fire separation, the penetration has to be firestopped. A tidy cable plant with an open sleeve through a fire wall still fails an inspection.
If the tray is going in anyway, pull the fiber backbone at the same time. Adding it later means booking the lift, closing aisles and working around a shutdown a second time.
What to have ready for the survey of an Ajax warehouse
A racking layout, even a rough one, shows where the aisles run and where tray can go. Add a list of everything that needs a cable at working height: charging stations, label printers, dock door equipment, cameras. If the office at the front is being fitted out as well, bring that plan too.
Ajax sits between Pickering to the west and Whitby, Oshawa and Clarington to the east, and we cable in all of them. The Durham Region cabling page has the rest of the area.
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. A lift under a live aisle is a safety problem for everyone, so the work runs either on an off shift or aisle by aisle with that aisle closed. Which one your site needs is settled at the quoting stage, not on the day.
Who provides the lift?
Tell us at the site survey what lifts or platforms are already on site, and whether anyone there is ticketed to run them. How the high work is reached is then set out in the quote, so it is agreed before anything is booked.
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.