How many network drops does your building need?
Count the things that need a cable, not the people. Most cabling quotes come in short because nobody counted the printers, the cameras, the door…
What the news actually means for your building
Notes on the things we get asked about most: what a piece of news means for a small business in Durham, what a decision costs you later if you get it wrong now, and how the equipment behind it works.
Written by the people doing the installs. No gated downloads, no forms in the way.
Planning tools
Free estimators that give you a defensible starting number, so you can compare quotes and spot one that is missing something.
How much recording storage do you actually need?
Retention is a decision, not a default. The right number is longer than the time it typically takes you to find out something happened, which for…
How many Wi-Fi access points does your space need?
Two different questions decide this, and mixing them up is why so much Wi-Fi disappoints. How far the signal has to reach is one problem. How many…
What should you budget for a website?
Six questions, and you get a realistic range for the build plus a separate figure for what it costs to keep running. Built from published Canadian…
Checklists worth printing
Everything in these is already on this site for free. These are the versions you can put in front of a contractor or hand to a member of staff. Email address only, and no sales call.
The office move IT checklist
You have signed a lease and the move is somewhere between six weeks and next month away.
The IT provider handover checklist
You are changing IT providers, or your IT person is leaving.
Electronic monitoring policy template
You have cameras, or you are about to, and you employ people in Ontario.
Managed IT
Support models, what a provider should be doing, and what to do when your IT person leaves.
Switching IT providers without losing access to your own systems
Most provider changes go fine. The ones that go badly go badly in one specific way: the business discovers, after giving notice, that it does not actually control its own systems.
Plain-English glossary of IT, network and security terms
Every trade has words it uses without thinking. Ours has more than most, and a lot of them get used in quotes without explanation.
When to switch IT providers: six signs you have outgrown yours, and two reasons to stay
Most businesses decide to fire their IT provider during one bad week. That is the wrong week to decide, because a bad week tells you about an incident and almost nothing about the…
IT budget planning for a small business fits on one page, not in a spreadsheet
Most small business IT budgets are not budgets. They are a record of things that already broke, written down after the invoice arrived. The line item says “computer stuff” and nobody…
Still running Windows 10? Waiting another year costs more than acting now
Most businesses that stayed on Windows 10 did the sensible thing. The machines worked, the deadline came and went, and nothing broke. That was the correct read for about ten months.
What AI actually does for a small business, according to the data rather than the pitch
Statistics Canada looked at whether Canadian firms that adopted AI became more productive. Once they controlled for the fact that adopters were already better-run companies with better…
What your cyber insurance renewal actually asks, taken from the real forms
Search for cyber insurance requirements and you will find dozens of IT companies telling you that insurers now demand endpoint detection, immutable backups and 24/7 monitoring. Almost…
Co-managed or fully managed IT: which fits a business with one IT person
Most businesses arrive at this question from one of two directions. Either they have nobody and are deciding how much to hand over, or they have one internal person who is drowning and…
Small business cyber security in Ontario: nobody is going to hack you, somebody is going to log in as you
Almost nothing that happens to a 10 to 80 person business is sophisticated. There is no zero day and no hooded figure. Somebody types a working password into a real Microsoft login…
What to do when your IT person quits: the first week is about access, not repairs
Your IT person just left. The instinct is to start interviewing. The real emergency is that one person may still be the only route into your domain name, your Microsoft 365 tenant…
Networks & cabling
Copper, fiber and wireless. Why the network is slow, and what “certified” means when someone says a cable is tested.
The office move IT checklist, in the order things have to happen
Office moves fail on lead times, not on effort. Everything on this list is straightforward. Two or three items take eight to twelve weeks whether you start early or late, and if you…
Starlink or fixed wireless for a rural Durham property
If you run a business on a rural property near Port Perry, Uxbridge or the north end of Clarington, this is a real decision with real consequences, and the marketing on both sides is…
Cat6 vs Cat6a: which one your building actually needs
Nearly every cabling quote you receive will offer Cat6 as standard, and some will offer Cat6a for more money as the future-proof option. Both are reasonable. Which one is right depends…
Fiber or a wireless link between two buildings
You have an office and a shop, or a main building and an outbuilding, and you want them on the same network. There are two real answers and the choice usually comes down to what is…
Why your phone dies inside your own building, and what legally fixes it in Canada
The signal is fine in the parking lot. Two bars at the front desk. Nothing in the back of the shop. Everyone has adapted by walking outside to take calls, which is a workaround your…
Most buildings do not need fiber optic cabling. Here is when yours does.
Fiber has a reputation as the fast option. Inside one ordinary building that is not the reason to install it, because copper already carries ten gigabit and nothing in a small office…
Structured cabling cost in Ontario is mostly the building, not the cable
Most owners assume a cabling quote is arithmetic: count the desks, multiply by a number, done. That is why three quotes for the same job come back so far apart that you suspect a…
Starlink at a work site solves one problem well and should almost never be your only link
For a property north of Uxbridge where the phone company’s answer is a shrug and a copper line from 1988, Starlink is a genuinely good answer. That is not a small thing. Plenty of…
Bad server rack cable management is an outage with a date already on it
Nobody books a rack cleanup. It gets booked for you, on the afternoon a link drops and nobody can tell which of the forty eight blue cords goes to the port that died.
Full bars, nothing loads: why business Wi-Fi is slow when busy
Coverage and capacity are two different problems, and the bars on your phone only measure one of them. One access point can put a strong signal into every corner of a building and…
A wireless bridge between buildings is a line of sight problem, not a distance problem
Everybody asks how far a wireless bridge between buildings can reach. Distance is rarely what kills the link. What kills it is a tree, a parapet wall or a neighbour’s new rooftop unit…
Tested and certified are not the same word, and only one of them is proof
“We tested every drop” can mean an installer plugged in a cheap continuity checker and watched eight lights come on. It can also mean a calibrated instrument measured nine electrical…
Security & surveillance
Cameras, alarms, access control and the cyber side. What gets recorded, what gets monitored, and what a breach actually looks like at this size.
Ontario’s electronic monitoring policy: what employers with 25 or more staff have to write down
If you employed 25 or more people in Ontario on 1 January, you were required to have a written policy on electronic monitoring in place before 1 March, and to give every employee a…
Most security cameras record everything and identify nobody
A security camera installation in Durham Region gets judged exactly once: on the morning somebody asks who took the trailer. Everything before that is a green light on a screen.
Recorded footage is a story you read afterwards. Monitoring is someone watching it happen.
Almost every camera system sold to a small business is a recorder. It answers questions on Monday morning. That is a real service and for a lot of buildings it is enough.
The camera you need is usually the one that stopped recording in March
A camera system fails silently. The recorder keeps running, the app still opens, most of the tiles still show live pictures, and the one that went dark months ago sits in a corner of…
Local NVR or cloud video: what you’re really choosing between
Two quotes for the same set of cameras can differ enormously in structure. One has a bigger number up front and nothing after it. The other has a smaller number up front and a monthly…
What actually happens in the ninety seconds after your alarm trips
The siren is the least useful part of an alarm system. It is a deterrent and a nuisance, and in an empty industrial building at 3am nobody hears it.
A key cannot tell you who opened the door at 2am, and cannot be switched off
Most businesses do not lose keys. They lose track of them. The cleaner’s key from four contracts ago, the spare in the drawer at the front desk, the one the last shop foreman never…
AI video analytics works, inside an envelope the salesperson will not read out to you
AI video analytics for a business camera system is real and it does useful work. The catch is that it works inside a narrow set of conditions, and the serious vendors publish those…
The sensor that pays for the alarm system is usually the cheapest one on the invoice
A business alarm system in Ontario gets sold on break-ins. Ask around your own street about what actually caused a shutdown, and you will hear about a burst pipe over the long weekend…
Deleting isn’t destroying: what’s still on the equipment you retired
There are probably four old laptops in a cupboard at your office right now, and a desktop under someone’s desk that nobody has turned on since 2021. Somebody deleted the files before…
Cloud & Microsoft 365
Licensing, migrations, backups and hosting. Mostly about what these platforms do not do for you.
Microsoft doesn’t back up your mailbox, and the recycle bin is not a backup either
Ask an owner whether their email is backed up and most say yes, it is in the cloud. Ask them what happens if a bookkeeper deletes a folder of supplier invoices in March and nobody…
Getting a trades business off paper, and what job software will not fix
A five-van operation running on paper work orders, a whiteboard and a lot of texting can absolutely function. Plenty do, profitably, for years. The cost is invisible: the quote that…
Cheap hosting is cheap because there’s nobody there
Hosting is one of the few things a business buys where the cheap option and the good option look identical on the invoice line. Both say “hosting.” One is $4 a month and one is $60…
Websites & getting found
Local search, listings and the site itself. Aimed at Durham, not the whole country.
Your business listings are probably wrong in three places you’ve never checked
There is a version of your business on the internet that you did not create and have never seen. It has an old phone number, or the address from before you moved, or hours that were…
Managed WordPress or cheap shared hosting
The price gap here is wide enough that people assume one option must be a rip-off. Neither is. They are sold to different situations, and the deciding factor is what happens to your…
Buildings & A/V
Boardrooms, signage, lighting and building systems.
The screen in your lobby is showing last winter’s hours
Digital signage projects almost never fail at installation. The screen goes up, the content looks good, everybody is pleased.
Nobody should spend the first ten minutes of a meeting fighting the TV
Every business has a version of this. Six people in a room, one laptop, a dongle that works for two of them, and a client on the call who cannot hear the person at the far end of the…
Building automation is not just for towers, and the cheapest win is a schedule
Most owners hear “building automation” and picture a control room in an office tower. The version that applies to a 10,000 square foot building in Whitby is much duller and much…
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A range is useful for deciding whether to start. A quote needs someone to look at what you have.