The network is the nervous system of a modern smart building. Every smart system — AV, lighting, climate, security, access control — depends on it. For UHNW clients where the expectation is absolute reliability and the estate may include dozens of connected systems across multiple structures, the network design must be engineered to a standard that is simply not available off the shelf.
Enterprise-Grade at Residential Scale
The core infrastructure principle for UHNW estates is the same as for a Tier II data centre: no single point of failure in any critical path. This means dual-stack switching with active-active failover, redundant core switching, and physically separate uplinks from the comms room to each floor distribution point.
We specify Cisco Catalyst or Juniper EX series core switching for all primary estates, with UniFi Enterprise or Cisco Meraki as the managed access layer depending on scale and management preference. All switches are IGMP snooping enabled, QoS-configured for AV traffic prioritisation, and VLAN-segmented to isolate AV, IoT, user devices and building automation on separate network segments.
Redundant Internet Connectivity
Primary estates should have at minimum dual internet feeds from different carriers on different physical routes — typically fibre broadband plus a 5G failover with automatic switchover. For primary residences used by clients with security requirements, a further satellite broadband backup is sometimes appropriate.
WiFi Design
WiFi 6 (802.11ax) is now our minimum specification for all UHNW deployments. We design to achieve -67dBm RSSI coverage at every occupied point in the estate, using a structured RF survey methodology. Access points are PoE+ powered from the managed switching infrastructure and managed centrally via a cloud controller platform.
