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Structured cablingCat5e, Cat6 and Cat6A structured cabling for offices, shops, warehouses, workshops and homes. We survey it, run it, terminate it and test every link — then hand you the results, so what's behind your walls isn't a mystery.
Cat5e, Cat6 and Cat6A permanent links from a comms cabinet out to wall outlets, floor boxes, desk grommets, ceiling points and plant rooms. Solid-core cable for the fixed run, stranded patch leads at the ends — not the other way round, which is a surprisingly common way to fail a test.
Wall-mounted 6U to 12U cabinets for a small office, floor-standing for a server room or a warehouse. Patch panel, cable management, shelf, power strip, lock and a fan kit if the cabinet gets warm. Terminated, dressed and labelled so the next person can read it.
Access points need a cable to work properly. We run one — or two, for a high density area — to each planned AP position, powered over the same cable from a PoE switch, so there's no fused spur needed at ceiling height.
IP cameras, door controllers, intercoms, digital signage and PoE clocks all run on the same structured cabling. One standard, one cabinet, one test report — rather than four separate systems with four separate sets of cable.
Where a run is over a hundred metres, crosses between buildings, or has to pass somewhere electrically noisy, fibre is the answer. Multimode inside a building, singlemode between them, armoured or ducted where it goes outside.
A cabinet nobody has labelled since 2014, an outlet that only ever runs at 100 megabits, a link that drops when the kettle goes on. We test what's there, tell you which runs pass and which don't, and price only the ones that need doing.
The category is a bandwidth rating, not a speed. What it buys you is headroom: how much signal the cable can carry cleanly, and therefore how far a given network speed will reach before it stops being reliable.
| Grade | Bandwidth | Gigabit | 10 Gigabit | Where it fits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cat5 | 100 MHz | Not rated | No | Obsolete. Superseded in 2001 — we don't install it, but plenty of buildings still have it and we'll test what you've got before you replace the lot. |
| Cat5e | 100 MHz | Full 100 m | No | Still perfectly good for desks, phones, printers and access points on a gigabit network. The sensible choice on a tight budget or a short-life fit-out. |
| Cat6 | 250 MHz | Full 100 m | Short runs only | The default for most new commercial work. Gigabit with real headroom, and 10 gigabit over shorter links. Thicker than Cat5e, so containment has to be sized for it. |
| Cat6A | 500 MHz | Full 100 m | Full 100 m | 10 gigabit anywhere on the floor. Worth it for Wi-Fi 6E/7 access points, video production, server-room links and anywhere you want the cabling to outlast three equipment refreshes. |
Ninety metres of fixed cable, plus up to ten metres of patch leads at the two ends. It's measured along the cable route — through the ceiling void, down the wall, around the beam — not across the floor plan, which is why a survey matters more than a drawing. Past that, you need a second cabinet, a fibre link, or a switch nearer the far end.
Copper-clad aluminium cable is aluminium with a thin copper skin. It's cheaper, it fails the standards, it runs hot on PoE and it snaps at the punch-down. We use solid copper, and if a quote you've had elsewhere looks impossibly cheap per metre, this is usually why.
PoE puts up to 90 watts down the same cable that carries the data. That's what runs access points, cameras and door entry without a socket at every position — but it makes cable quality and bundle sizes matter, because current in a tight bundle means heat, and heat costs you reach.
Low smoke zero halogen sheathing gives off far less smoke and no halogen gas in a fire. It's the right choice — and often a requirement — in escape routes, public buildings, schools, care settings and anywhere the cable runs through a protected corridor. We'll tell you which your building needs.
We walk the building, not the drawing. Where the cabinet goes, where the power for it comes from, what's above the ceiling, what the walls are made of, where the mains runs, how we get from A to B, and how long each route really is. You get a point-by-point schedule and a fixed price off the back of it.
Cable needs somewhere to live: basket or tray above the ceiling, dado or mini-trunking at desk level, conduit where it's exposed, fire-stopping wherever it passes through a compartment wall. Done first, and sized with room to add more later.
Cable is pulled from the cabinet position out to every point, kept clear of mains by the required separation, kept inside its bend radius, and left with enough slack at both ends to be terminated twice if it ever needs it. This is the disruptive part, so it's the part we do out of hours if you need us to.
Outlets, faceplates and floor boxes fitted; every core punched down to T568B at both ends; the cabinet built out with the patch panel, management bars and patch leads, dressed so you can trace a run by eye.
Every link tested against the standard for its grade, with a pass or fail per link and the measured figures behind it. Anything that fails gets re-terminated and re-tested until it passes — a fail on the report is not something you're asked to live with.
Matching identifiers on the outlet, the patch panel port and the test result, a cabinet schedule, and the results file. Ten minutes of walking you round it, so the person who has to plug something in next week knows what they're looking at.
A £15 continuity tester tells you the eight wires are in the right order. That's about a fifth of what can be wrong with a link. A certifying tester measures the cable's electrical performance against the standard and gives a pass or fail with the numbers behind it.
The output is a file — one result per link, each one named to match the label on the outlet. Keep it with your building records. If a link ever misbehaves, you have the day-one baseline to compare it against, and if you sell or let the building, you have proof of what's installed.
Desks move, and cabling that assumed they wouldn't becomes an extension-lead nest within a year. We cable to positions with spare capacity built in, and put the cabinet somewhere you can actually open the door of.
Tills, card machines, back-office PCs, guest Wi-Fi and cameras, usually in a building nobody can close for a week. Out-of-hours first fix, cable kept out of reach and out of sight, and the guest network kept off the till network.
Long distances, steel, dust and machinery that throws electrical noise around. That means proper separation from mains, the right containment, and fibre where copper would be pushed past its limit.
One or two solid runs from the router to where you actually work beats a mesh node fighting a wall. Outbuildings get external-grade or armoured cable, or fibre where the distance or the lightning risk calls for it.
For a normal office running gigabit to desks, phones, printers and access points, Cat5e still does the job and Cat6 gives you headroom for very little extra. Choose Cat6A when you want 10 gigabit to the outlet over a full-length run, or when the cabling has to outlive two or three equipment refreshes. Since most of the cost of a cabling job is labour and containment rather than the cable itself, going one grade up is usually cheap; going back and redoing it later is not.
Ninety metres of fixed cable between the patch panel and the outlet, plus up to ten metres of patch leads at the two ends — one hundred metres end to end. That limit comes from the standards the equipment is designed against, and it is measured along the cable route, not across the floor plan. Anything beyond it needs a second cabinet, a fibre link, or a switch closer to the far end.
Every link is tested with a certifying tester, not a continuity beeper. That measures wiremap, length, insertion loss, near-end and far-end crosstalk, return loss and delay skew against the standard for the grade installed, and gives a pass or fail per link. You get the results as a file, with each link labelled to match the label on the outlet and the patch panel, so any future engineer can find the same run in seconds.
Yes. First fix — the noisy, dusty part where cable is pulled through ceilings and walls — is the part worth doing out of hours, and it is usually the shorter half of the job. Termination and testing are quiet and can normally happen around you. Tell us your trading hours at survey stage and we will plan the work around them.
Usually. We test what is already there first, because a cabinet full of unlabelled cable is not the same problem as a genuinely failed link. Often a handful of runs are faulty or wired to the wrong standard at one end, and the rest are fine. You get a report of what passes, what fails and why, and a price to put right only the parts that need it.
Data cabling is extra-low voltage, so it is separate work from your mains. We install the data side and keep the required separation from mains cabling. Where a job needs new sockets, a spur for a cabinet or anything else on the mains side, we work alongside your electrician, or bring one in and coordinate the two trades so you are not booking them twice.
Once the network's in, the other half of Lannex builds what runs on it — websites, internal tools, AI agents and everyday IT support.
How many points, roughly what the place is, and when you'd want it done. If you don't know how many points you need, say that instead — working it out is the survey's job, not yours. A real person replies within one working day.