Networks that span Cincinnati's hills, bridges and brick

Office and warehouse networks

Older buildings in Over-the-Rhine and Pendleton have thick brick walls that swallow Wi-Fi signals, while newer flex space in Blue Ash and West Chester tends to have the opposite problem of neighbors crowding the same channels. We survey the space, place access points where they will help, and separate guest, staff and device networks.

Firewalls are configured, monitored and kept on current firmware. For businesses with sites on both sides of the river, we connect locations securely so a Florence warehouse and a downtown office can share systems as if they were down the hall from each other. Warehouse scanners and label printers sit on their own segment, apart from the finance and email traffic in the office.

Old buildings, new buildings and the hills in between

Cincinnati's building stock is unusually varied. Over-the-Rhine holds one of the largest collections of nineteenth-century Italianate architecture in the country, and its thick masonry walls stop Wi-Fi cold. Office parks in Blue Ash and Mason were built for cubicles and have since been opened up. Warehouses along I-71 and in Boone County have ceilings tall enough that ordinary access points barely reach the floor.

We start with measurements rather than guesses, checking signal and interference in the rooms people actually use. Access points are placed and powered over Ethernet where cabling allows, with channels planned so neighboring tenants do not drown each other out. In historic spaces, that sometimes means more access points at lower power, mounted wherever landlords and preservation rules allow.

Linking sites across the river

A Greater Cincinnati company can easily have an office downtown, a warehouse near the airport in Hebron and a few people working in Lawrenceburg, which means three states and at least two internet providers. We connect locations with site-to-site VPN tunnels over business internet, so staff reach shared applications and printers without any of them being exposed to the internet.

Local options include altafiber's fiber network, which grew out of the old Cincinnati Bell, and cable service across much of the metro, plus fixed wireless at a few outlying sites. Where an outage would stop shipping or sales, we recommend a second circuit from a different provider and configure the firewall to fail over by itself. Traffic between sites is encrypted, and each tunnel is watched so a dropped link raises an alert.

Keeping warehouse devices away from the money

Handheld scanners, label printers, time clocks, cameras and HVAC controllers rarely get security updates and often ship with weak default settings. On a flat network they sit right next to the controller's laptop and the payroll system. We move them to their own segments with firewall rules that let them reach only the warehouse management system and the few services they genuinely need.

Guest Wi-Fi gets its own segment as well, isolated from everything internal. Firewall rules are reviewed against a written baseline, unused ports are closed, remote management is restricted and firmware updates are scheduled outside shipping windows. Everything is diagrammed, so a new supervisor or an auditor can see how the network is laid out without tracing cables by hand.