Why we started HK Unifi

Before HK Unifi, I spent years installing networks as a subcontractor. The pattern was always the same: an office with six people, a premium broadband contract, and a router from a computer shop that had been the best one in the shop two years earlier.

The problem was never the broadband

Slow Wi-Fi in a small Hong Kong office is rarely a bandwidth problem. It is a placement problem, a device-count problem, or a wall of concrete. Nobody measured any of it — the equipment was swapped and the invoice sent.

The first install

In 2014 a solicitor's office in Jordan asked us to fix a network that had already been "fixed" twice. We surveyed the floor, moved two access points out of a cupboard, ran one new cable and separated the guest network. The dropped calls stopped that same afternoon. That job is still our template: measure first, then quote.

Four rules we have kept

1. Survey before quoting. No price means anything until someone has walked the space and scanned the channels.
2. Document everything. Rack layout, port map, VLANs and credentials are handed over at the end of every project.
3. Answer the phone. A network is infrastructure. If yours is down, waiting three days for a reply is not acceptable.
4. No lock-in. Support contracts cover monitoring and response times, never access to your own equipment.

Where we are now

Four engineers, more than five hundred sites across Hong Kong, and the same work as in the first year: offices, shops and clinics that need Wi-Fi, cabling and cameras to be reliable rather than impressive.

If you are being told your broadband is the problem, ask someone to measure it first. That is what we do.