Broadband for six offices

[ST12AT]

I have a building with a single phone line which is being converted to six offices (2 to 3 people per office). My initial plan was to have a old school style modem in the landlords cupboard along with a switch which each office will be connected to via CAT6. Within each office will then be a wireless router and dado trunking with Ethernet ports.

The line will give 65-80mbs according to Openreach.

I think this will work?

[megaphone]

What about security? Will each office network need to be isolated from the other? Same with any WiFi. I'd stick a very good router at the head and give each office an isolated vlan.

[Alucidnation]

Potentially 10mb per office?

I can't imagine that will go down well.

Just get a leased line and be done with it.

[macstorm73]

And for wifi it would be easiest to use something like meraki with individual ssids all managed centrally. If you also use meraki switches you can manage everything from one place including vlans and security

[Mr Pointy]

I think you'd potentially end up with a very poor result.

• Security - you'd need a good switch & know how to configure it to VLAN each office off from the others
• Bandwidth allocation - you'd need to allocate bandwidth to each office or you could have a heavy user making the connection unusable for the other five offices. You'd end up with a poor reputation.
• Upload speed - it's way less than the download speed & again you could be sharing it across 18 users. If any of the businesses upload images or use Office 365/Gsuite you need upload speed as much as download - leased lines are often symmetric up & down

For the cost I'd just look at getting six lines run in & stick a bunch of Dratek routers in so you get automatic segregation without much hassle & won't have clients complaining about crappy internet connection. It's probably the most important requirement for just about any small business these days. Sign up with Zen & they'll even give you the router for free.