Marlowe Estate
The Network Delivered
QUICK SURF NETWORK
Unleashing Digital Excellence
Zero Rooms Below Threshold.
This page documents the network as it stands today at a large private villa — not what was found there. The estate was first surveyed by QSN as an independent audit of an existing third-party installation, and the findings of that audit are published separately. What follows is the network that replaced it: designed from measurement, modelled before installation, segmented and policed by design, and verified by a second measured survey walked on the original points. Every figure on this page describes the delivered state. Nothing here is a projection, a model output or a manufacturer claim.
A flat network has one security boundary: the front door. Once a device is inside, it can reach everything. Segmentation replaces that single boundary with one per class of device, so a compromised tablet, a misbehaving IoT controller or a guest handset is confined to the segment it was put in. Each segment below carries its own addressing, its own DHCP scope, its own firewall posture and its own decoy host.
Wireless performance is decided on the wire. Access points are only as good as the link feeding them, and a segmented network is only as trustworthy as the switch ports enforcing the tags. Every unmanaged switch found on the estate was removed — an unmanaged unit spliced into a segmented network silently places everything downstream on the wrong segment, which is exactly what was happening here before.
| Layer | Delivered Configuration | Why It Is Built This Way |
|---|---|---|
| Core | Aggregation switch, 10 GbE SFP+ | All switches home to a single deliberate core rather than daisy-chaining. Traffic between segments takes one predictable path. |
| Spanning Tree | Root elected by explicit priority | Priorities are set per switch so the root is chosen by design. Left at default, the root is decided arbitrarily and can move on any reboot. |
| Access Layer | Managed PoE switching throughout | Every access point, camera feed and wall switch draws power and carries tags from a managed port that can be monitored, profiled and shut down. |
| Port Profiles | Every port assigned to its segment | No port is left on a default profile. A device plugged into the wrong socket does not silently land on a trusted network. |
| PoE Budget | Loaded to a design ceiling, not to capacity | Power draw was audited before new positions were energised and headroom was specified deliberately, so the estate can grow without a switch swap. |
| Edge Protection | Auto edge ports, link debounce, storm control | End-device ports are kept out of spanning-tree convergence and brief link flaps are absorbed rather than propagated as topology changes. |
Access-point count is not coverage. An estate can hold dozens of units and still leave rooms unusable, because signal peaks at each unit and falls away across the spaces between them. Every position on this estate was determined by a predictive model built from the architectural set and measured wall construction, then verified by walking the building afterwards.
Unit type was selected per zone rather than bought in bulk: wall-plate units where rooms are small and cable already lands behind a fixture, higher-gain ceiling units across open spans, weatherised units for the grounds and roof. Transmit power was tuned per unit so each covers its own zone rather than bleeding through slabs into the level above — bleed is not coverage, it is interference wearing a coverage costume.
The whole estate now runs a single current hardware generation. Every previous-generation unit was removed, and every access point is fed by its own structured cable — there is no wireless backhaul anywhere on the estate, indoors or out.
QSN specifies Cat 6 or Cat 6A solid, full-copper cable on every installation, and never copper-clad aluminium. CCA fails under PoE load, runs hot, breaks at the termination, and will pass a cheap continuity test while quietly limiting a link for the life of the building. Access points, cameras and PoE switching all draw their power through that conductor — the cable is a power delivery system as much as a data one.
On this estate every run was pulled to a published schedule, terminated, labelled and tested end to end, with test records issued as a condition of acceptance. Where legacy runs were suspect, they were replaced outright rather than traced and hoped over — on a finished property a new pull costs less than chasing a doubtful one through a ceiling, and it ends the argument permanently.
Walked Again, On The Same Points
A design is a prediction until someone measures it. Every level and the grounds were re-walked on the identical survey points used in the original audit, with the property clear of other trades so the readings reflect the finished environment rather than a building site. The interior after-maps are plotted on the same tightened scale the predictive design was modelled on, so the design and the result can be read directly against each other.
Fourteen rooms measured below the usable threshold at audit. None remain. Every space that was cold now reads at or near the strongest band on its own level, each served from a position placed by the model and installed on a tested run.
Reading the Exterior Result — Why It Is Not Plotted Like the Interior
The four interior levels form a like-for-like pair: same points, same instrument, same plotting scale. The grounds do not, and the difference is stated rather than smoothed over.
The exterior baseline and the exterior result were plotted to different lower bounds, so the later map renders a band of low signal the earlier one could not display at all. The two exterior maps are read individually, not overlaid.
The exterior baseline was walked with only two outdoor units connected, the remainder having been removed during remodelling. It records what the grounds delivered on the day; it is not an assessment of an exterior design, because no exterior design had ever been surveyed.
Indoors the limiting factor is attenuation through slabs and partitions over short spans. Outdoors it is distance and free-space path loss across driveway, pool deck and perimeter, with the building itself as the obstruction. Coverage falls off on a different curve, so an identical dBm figure does not carry identical meaning in the two environments.
The cooler band across the centre of the exterior map lies over the building footprint, which carries no exterior survey points. That area is interpolated between perimeter readings and must not be read as a measured exterior result.
Stated plainly: the exterior improvement is real and measured at the walked points — the grounds moved from the weakest band across their entirety to the top of the scale including the boundary line — but it is presented as two independent measured walks rather than a matched pair, because the plotting floors differ. Where a comparison cannot be made like for like, we say so instead of presenting it as one.
Bespoke Means Measured, Not Expensive
“Bespoke” is usually a word for a bigger invoice. At QSN it means something narrower and more useful: the design is derived from this building, and would be wrong for any other one. The wall construction was measured rather than assumed. The port and power audit was completed before anything new was energised. The segment list follows the trust boundaries that genuinely exist in the household. The access-point count fell out of the model instead of being chosen first and justified afterwards.
That discipline usually reduces what gets installed rather than increasing it. Serviceable existing units were recovered, re-adopted and reused wherever the design allowed it, and unit types were selected so that the correct number of access points is the minimum the coverage model actually requires — not one more. A measured design is the cheapest way to avoid paying twice.
