{
  "id": 13823873,
  "title": "How We Built a 200-User Office Network in Three Weeks",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/11/how-we-built-a-200-user-office-network-in-three-weeks",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-11T23:22:32.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/interdatalink/how-we-built-a-200-user-office-network-in-three-weeks-4opd"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "A financial firm moved into a new office space in Midtown Manhattan, expecting all the necessary infrastructure to be in place for their 200+ employees on opening day. With just three weeks to prepare, they had to install cabling, Wi-Fi, phones, and conference room systems from scratch. The team designed a network using Cisco Catalyst 9300 UPOE switches, 10 Cisco CW9166I access points, 2 Meraki MX95 firewalls, and two internet circuits from separate carriers. The firewalls ran as a warm-spare pair, with one carrying traffic and the other taking over automatically if it failed. Each internet circuit was from a different carrier to ensure redundancy. All devices were managed through the Meraki dashboard for easy monitoring. The team surveyed the floor before placing the access points, ensuring optimal coverage and avoiding dead conference rooms. They also scripted a PoE budget check to ensure each switch could supply full power to all connected access points. The project faced a delay due to late carrier delivery of internet circuits, but they had a cellular fallback ready and kept the opening date. The key lessons learned included ordering critical dependencies early, having a cellular fallback ready, carefully checking PoE budgets, and assigning one team to manage the entire path from wall jacks to firewalls.",
  "summary": "A financial firm was moving into a full floor in Midtown Manhattan. More than 200 people would sit down on opening day and expect the wired ports, the Wi-Fi, the phones and the conference rooms to work. We had three weeks, and we were starting from a floor with no cabling in it. This is what we installed, why we chose it, and the one thing that went wrong. The design in one picture **[IMAGE: 4…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}