If you are fitting out or refurbishing an office, structured cabling is one of those jobs where quotes can vary wildly and it is hard to know what is fair. This guide breaks down what actually affects the price, the rough ranges we see across Ilkeston and the wider East Midlands, and how to avoid paying for things you do not need.
Most installers, including us, price structured cabling per point rather than as one lump sum. A point is a single faceplate position, typically with one or two RJ45 outlets, run back to a central patch panel in a comms cabinet.
As a rough guide, expect somewhere between £90 and £180 per point for Cat6 in a standard commercial office. Cat6a runs a little higher, often £130 to £220 per point, because the cable is thicker, fussier to terminate and needs more careful separation from power.
The headline per-point figure assumes a fairly straightforward run. The building itself is usually what moves the number. A modern open-plan office with accessible suspended ceilings and floor boxes is quick to cable; a converted Victorian mill unit, of which Ilkeston and Derbyshire have plenty, with solid walls and limited containment, takes far longer.
Distance matters too. The further each desk is from the comms room, the more cable and time per point, and runs over 90 metres need rethinking entirely. Containment, trunking, floor boxes and making good after the work all add to the bill.
For a typical 20-person office wanting two outlets per desk, you are looking at around 40 points. At Cat6, that often lands between £4,000 and £7,000 supplied and installed, including a wall-mounted cabinet, patch panel, testing and certification.
Smaller jobs carry a higher per-point cost because the setup and travel are spread across fewer points, so a handful of new outlets in an existing office might feel pricey per point but still be a modest total. Always ask whether testing and a certification report are included, as cutting these is a common way to make a quote look cheaper.
Any figure given without seeing the site is a guess. A short site visit lets an installer check cable routes, the comms room, power and the state of the building, which is where the real cost lives.
Ask for a written quote that lists the cable category, number of points, the cabinet and passive hardware, and confirms that every link will be tested and certified. That makes it easy to compare like for like rather than chasing the lowest headline number.
For most offices Cat6 comfortably handles gigabit speeds and is the practical default. Choose Cat6a if you are running 10GbE between switches, supporting high-density wireless access points, or simply want the cabling to outlast several equipment refreshes.
Not always. If you have an existing cabinet with spare patch panel capacity and power it can often be reused, but if it is full or poorly located a new wall-mounted or floor-standing cabinet is usually a sensible part of the project.
A 40-point office is typically a one to three day job depending on building access and whether work must happen out of hours. Older or occupied buildings take longer, which is why a site visit gives a far more reliable timescale than a phone estimate.
Tell us about your project, send any drawings or schedules, and we'll come back the same day with a clear, itemised quote.
