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Networking

The cable plan you wish you had three years ago

November 27, 2025·3 min read

Most office networking failures aren't failures of the equipment. They're failures of the cable plan that was made (or not made) when the office was built out. Once the drywall is up, running new cable is expensive — sometimes prohibitively so — and the network ages around the limits of whatever was installed initially. The decisions made in the fifteen minutes before the contractor started pulling cable are still constraining your business five years later.

The fix is to think about cable runs the same way you think about electrical: overprovision now because retrofitting later costs ten times more. Every desk and every meeting room should have a wall jack. Every access point location should have two cables (one for power-over-ethernet, one as a backup or for a higher-capacity AP later). The server closet should be over-served by cable runs to every wall jack, terminated in a properly-labeled patch panel that doesn't require an electrical degree to interpret. Cat6A is the floor in 2025; consider fiber for any run over 100 meters.

The single highest-leverage place to put extra cable is the ceiling near where access points might go. Wi-Fi will keep getting faster (Wi-Fi 7, 8, eventually 9), and the access points keep needing more bandwidth back to the switch. An AP with a 2.5 Gbps uplink is wasted on a 1 Gbps cable run. A cable run is permanent infrastructure; the AP plugged into it is consumables. Plan for the cable to outlast three generations of access points.

If you're moving into space someone else built — and you can't run new cable — the alternative is to plan around what's there. Identify where the existing cable runs go and pick AP placements that match. Don't try to force Wi-Fi to cover a corner of the building where you can't put a wired AP. The right answer is sometimes "a wired access point in a small closet near where people sit, and we plan the floor plan around it." Wireless looks like it should be infinitely flexible. The wires it depends on are not.

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