Square footage is a poor predictor of what a network costs. A warehouse and a professional office of the same size are not comparable jobs: one is a building made of radio-hostile steel with three devices in it, the other is forty people in glass partitions who all join a call at nine.
What actually drives the figure is the number of things that have to be installed and the number of walls in the way.
The parts that scale
Access points. How many depends on shape and construction, not area. Concrete, steel racking, plasterboard and glass all behave differently. Our pricing steps down as the count rises, because the second and tenth access point cost less to configure than the first.
Cable drops. Every run is labour: pulled, terminated, tested, labelled. This is usually the largest single line on a cabling job, and it is the one most often underestimated — the desk that needs two ports, not one; the ceiling access point that needs a run of its own.
Days on site. Cable work is hands in ceilings. A network setup includes a day on site in the price, and additional days are charged as their own line, so a job that takes three days reads as three days rather than as an unexplained total.
The parts that are decisions, not sizes
Firewall and network zones. Whether the guest Wi-Fi, the point-of-sale and the office network can see each other is a design question with a security answer. Segmentation costs little at install and a great deal to retrofit.
Guest access. A captive portal is a small addition and the right one if visitors use your Wi-Fi. Handing out the office password is the alternative, and it is worse than it sounds.
VPN. If people work from elsewhere, this is where it gets configured. Priced per user because that is how the licensing and the setup actually work.
Who supplies the equipment. You can buy it, or ask us to — we quote equipment separately rather than hiding a margin in a labour line, and asking us to supply it sends the quote to a person, since it depends on what is available that month.
What a site survey is for
On a straightforward office, an access point count from a floor plan is close enough. On a warehouse, a multi-floor building, or anywhere with a previous network that half works, a survey pays for itself: it measures coverage rather than guessing it, and it finds the dead corner before you have paid to cable the wrong ceiling.
If you have had unexplained Wi-Fi complaints in a building you already occupy, a survey is the cheapest way to find out why.
Before you ask for a quote
Know the floor plan, roughly how many people and devices, whether the internet connection is in and where it lands, and whether the ceilings are accessible. Those four answers move the estimate more than anything else you can tell us, and the configurator asks for them directly.