IT support for Oxford businesses

Built for the busy weekend, not the quiet Tuesday

Most small-business networks are sized for typical load. In Oxford, typical load is not the problem. The problem is the weekend when the town's population effectively doubles.

A restaurant that handles forty covers comfortably discovers its Wi-Fi collapses at a hundred and forty, because the access point that was adequate is now serving five times the devices. A retailer's card terminals start timing out at the exact hour they can least afford it. The failure is almost never bandwidth from the internet provider; it is access point density and channel planning inside the building.

We design for the peak, because in Oxford the peak is the part that pays.

The Square and its buildings

Oxford's commercial heart is historic buildings, and historic buildings are hostile to Wi-Fi. Thick masonry, plaster over lath, additions built across decades, and in many cases a preservation constraint on what you can drill, run and mount.

Those jobs are a design problem more than an equipment problem: working out where signal can actually reach, where a cable can legitimately run, and how to get coverage into a back dining room or upstairs office without anything visible from the street. It is slower work than a modern building and it is a good part of what we do in Oxford.

Rental property and the multi-site pattern

A large share of Oxford business is property: student rentals, short-term lets and the management companies running them, often across many addresses.

That is a multi-site problem wearing different clothes. Each property needs internet that works without a technician visiting, access that can be handed over and revoked between tenants, and a way to see remotely whether a unit is actually online before someone arrives to complain. Managing twenty properties the way you manage one does not scale, and it is usually the first thing we fix.

University-adjacent professional services

Around the university sits a dense layer of law firms, accountants, medical practices and consultancies, many small but handling genuinely sensitive material.

For those, the work is rarely dramatic: multi-factor authentication actually enabled, email secured against impersonation, backups that have been test-restored, and a clear answer to what happens when a laptop goes missing. Unglamorous, and the difference between a bad afternoon and a reportable incident.