In the London area, we can visit your premises to provide free advice on how we can help you improve your voice and data communications.

With extensive experience managing networks since 1997, Snell Systems can design, install and maintain new systems that will meet your current and future needs with the latest technology. We can also repair, upgrade, and expand existing systems.

New Installations

Planning the construction of a new office, or wanting to network an existing office?

We can advise at the building planning phase on the siting of wiring closets and the layout of server rooms, both due to the effects of restrictions on maximum cable length of modern high-speed networks and the physical network topology that would best suit your usage, rather than becoming a productivity-sapping bottleneck.

If you already have an office full of PCs, we can show you how a network could boost your productivity, allowing shared access to expensive resources such as reliable backed-up disks, printers, and Internet access.

Small office / Home office

Many small or home offices make do with either no networking, or network cables run across the carpet and behind furniture, which is unreliable and a potential trip hazard that could cost you more than just money.

Organisations in this situation often find a cabling company aiming solely at high-value large office contracts to be prohibitively expensive; however, our special rates for small installations without the need for wiring closets or long runs of backbone cabling (from £15 per socket) will allow you to install a tidy, reliable, easy to use cabling system that can connect your PCs in a network, and even carry your phone cabling - meaning that the PC and telephone on each desk plug together into a twin socket, and where the phone lines come into the building or your PBX is sited, you can use a short "patch cable" to connect each actual phone line to the desired desk. If somebody moves desk, you can move their phone line with them in under ten seconds.

The wired household

Increasingly, people are connecting multiple PCs with networks in the home. This allows effortless sharing of broadband Internet connections and printers. However, as with small businesses, this is too often accomplished with untidy wiring or expensive wireless networks.

Home networks tend to involve a smaller number of actual points than an office network, but the physical appearance of the cabling becomes paramount.

Our carpenters can design and install custom cable enclosures, as well as running cables behind existing skirting boards and cavity walls.

Alternatively, if there is no way to run cabling through your home without affecting its appearance, or if you would like the freedom to use laptop computers around the home, we can advise on and install a wireless network that meets your requirements.

Charities and Non-Profit organisations

We always enjoy working with charities, and will gladly offer discounted prices for setting up networks for charities; for good causes, we also have a limited ability to gather volunteers from our staff (and their friends!) to install networks for nothing more than the costs of materials (and maybe something towards travel, depending on the circumstances). Please email or call us to discuss your situation.

Internet connectivity

We can connect your home or business network to the Internet using a variety of technologies, such as dialup, ISDN, ADSL / broadband, SDSL, and leased lines. This allows your workstations to access the Internet for Web, email, and other applications; while a firewall disallows any externally-initiated connections to your workstations, to protect them from Internet worms.

Over and beyond the basic setup, we can also configure "demilitarized zones", where your own public Web and email servers sit outside the protected area of the network containing your workstations, and "virtual private networks", where multiple networks at different physical offices are joined using an encrypted "tunnel" over the Internet, allowing shared access to files and other resources between your sites.

Upgrades and Maintenance

If you have an existing network that you suspect may be becoming a bottleneck, or you need more sockets installed, or if some of the sockets you have aren't working any more - we can help. We can audit existing networks and test physical cabling using our advanced tools, and quickly pinpoint the sources of problems. At which point, we can advise on the most effective way of solving your problem, and with your approval our engineers can then install, repair, and replace.

Going Wireless

Wireless networks allow computers to form a network using radio waves rather than physical cabling.

The advantages of this are the cost savings in not fitting cables, no need to drill holes and lay conduits around your lovely (or listed) building, and the ability to connect to the network with a laptop from anywhere in or around the building, without having to find the nearest socket and run a cable to it.

However, the disadvantages are the requirement for more expensive network hardware in the computers themselves than if you were using cables, problems with intermittent reception (some parts of the building may have poor reception due to the structure of the building itself, and interference from various sources), the security implications of people being able to connect to your network without needing to get into the building, and the lower available bandwidth of a wireless network making it unsuitable for high-performance applications.

Many organisations benefit from a mixture of the two; wired networking between the server cluster and to offices, supported by a wireless network with appropriate security measures that can be used for roving laptops.

Either way, we can advise on the solution that's correct for you, and then supply it.