Located in Glasgow, Direct Panels are a privately-owned retailer of high quality vehicle parts, specializing in body parts such as paneling. They offer an unrivaled, extensive range of high quality products and pride themselves when it comes to customer service.

Direct Panels came to us on the recommendation of another of our clients, Glasgow City Plumbing. They were about to move out of their old office and into a brand new, expertly decorated new office on the other side of the warehouse.

Direct Panels phoned us in order to arrange a face-to-face meeting to discuss how we could help move their existing network into their new office. During the meeting we discussed the some of the issues they had been facing and we were made aware that the staff were experiencing slow speeds and occasional downtime occurrences.

We discussed the option of replacing the network almost entirely in order to resolve these issues and improve the speed of the network. The Direct Panels team saw value in this proposition and deiced to go ahead with the replacement, trusting NovaBytes would be able to improve their current situation.

A walk-through of the building was carried out and it was clear that the issues were being caused by degraded cables, a mix of cable types and failing ports on switches. It was also very apparent that there was a big lack of cable management in place and the term “spaghetti junction” was thrown around the room.

We then encountered an obstacle when we discovered that electrical cables had already been routed to the new office and terminated in the middle of the room where the desks were located. These cables had been sealed off, preventing access for our Ethernet cabling.

After this meeting, once we had all the information we needed, we scoped the new network for the Direct Panels team, including diagrams, written explanations and our recommended parts, alongside a quote for the work. We wanted to use Ubiquiti for this job as it was going to require robust equipment that would also provide excellent speeds. The quoted work was signed off by the MD of Direct Panels on the same day and we arranged a time and date to come in.

NovaBytes carried out the work on a Saturday so that there was no disruption to the business during the week. Upon arrival we quickly dismantled the old network and discarded the old, degraded cabling. A significant amount labour-intensive work was carried out at this point in order to remove old worktops in order to access the ISP’s point-of-presence (the main internet line).

Once this initial work to deconstruct the old network and source the internet line was completed we ran Cat6, shielded LSOH Solid Core Cable to the new location and provided an access point within the new building.

Following this access point being installed we were able to configure the new network in the new office, utilising the Ubiquiti switching we had suggested. We configured the new network to supply internet to the 7 computers and phones in the new office, along with a server and a printer. Given the existing electrical cabling was already installed and sealed, we devised a discreet trunking and floor cover solution to uphold the exceptional standard set by the decorators

Finally, we were able to implement a new firewall on the network, allowing for careful monitoring and filtering of network traffic to prevent any unauthorised access to the network.

Direct Panels have now moved into their new office and are reaping the benefits of having a lightning-fast cat6 ethernet network installed. They were previously experiencing several issues that were affecting the way they worked on a regular basis but have now seen a massive increase in moral and productivity because of the speed, stability and reliability of the network.

On top of this, Direct Panels is now ready to start moving onto wifi 6 using Ubiquiti Access Points as there main source of connectivity. When the management start replacing the PC’s and desk phones we will be able to remove additional cabling and provide the staff with a cable-less work environment on their desks.