Network & Wi-Fi Setup

Office and home network setup runs €299–€599 plus hardware, firewall configuration €199–€399, and a site-to-site or remote-access VPN €149–€349. Hardware is quoted at cost with the supplier invoice shown. A survey first is always cheaper than buying three mesh units that turn out to be solving the wrong problem.

Sometimes. Mesh solves coverage, not interference or backhaul — if the satellite units are talking to the base over the same congested wireless channel, you get bars with no throughput, which feels worse than no signal at all. Where a cable can be run, a wired access point beats mesh every time and usually costs less.

Usually band steering or an old wireless card. Phones hop to 5GHz readily; some laptops cling to a congested 2.4GHz channel shared with every neighbour, the baby monitor and the microwave. It is diagnosable in minutes with a proper scan, and the fix is often a €25 adapter rather than a new router.

Yes — Cat6 runs, patch panels, wall points and tidy terminations, in offices and in homes. It is unglamorous and it is the single best money most businesses spend on their network, because a cable delivers the same speed in year eight as it did on day one.

Yes, and for any business with customers on site you should. A guest network on its own VLAN means a visitor's infected phone cannot see your server, your till or your NAS. It takes about twenty minutes on decent hardware and it is included in a normal setup rather than sold as an extra.

Whatever fits the building and the budget rather than whatever carries the best margin. In practice that is often UniFi or similar for access points, a proper firewall — SonicWall or pfSense — where the business needs one, and consumer gear where consumer gear is genuinely enough. I'll tell you when the cheap option is fine.