Retail Chain Wi-Fi & Network Upgrade

The Situation

A NSW-based retail group operating three boutique stores across Sydney contacted us after their point-of-sale terminals began dropping off the network during peak trading. Their existing network had been assembled by successive contractors over several years: consumer-grade routers, no separate guest network, and Wi-Fi access points mounted wherever a power point happened to be.

Staff were rebooting routers at least twice a week. EFTPOS transactions timed out at the register, stock lookups on tablets stalled, and customers complained about slow in-store guest Wi-Fi. The business owner had received conflicting quotes from electricians and IT resellers and did not know what a properly designed network actually cost.

The Problem We Found

• No wireless site survey had ever been performed. Access points were positioned purely for aesthetics, not for RF coverage.
• POS terminals, staff tablets, security cameras and guest devices shared the same SSID with no segmentation.
• The router provided by the internet service provider was handling both routing and wireless, with no firewall policy.
• Cabling from the storefront to the back office was running through ceiling tiles that were not rated for network use.
• No network documentation existed. When a fault occurred, nobody could tell us which switch port belonged to which register.

What We Did

We started with a paid wireless site survey at each of the three stores. Our engineer mapped signal strength, channel overlap and source of interference in the storefront, the stock room and the checkout area. We then produced a Bill of Materials specific to each site rather than a generic kit.

The design included:

• A managed Cisco Meraki firewall at each site with VLAN segmentation for POS, staff, cameras and guest Wi-Fi.
• Ceiling-mounted Wi-Fi access points positioned to cover the counter, the change rooms and the window displays, not the storeroom wall.
• New Cat 6 data runs from the MDF to each register location, tested and labelled.
• A separate guest SSID isolated from the internal network, with a captive portal for marketing opt-in.
• Cloud-based network monitoring so our team could see a device drop offline before the store manager called us.

Installation was scheduled outside trading hours. We worked one store at a time over three consecutive Sundays, with a rollback plan if the new firewall did not come online cleanly.

Outcome

The project was completed on the agreed fixed price. The retailer has since referred two neighbouring businesses to us for the same work.

Technical detail

We deployed three FortiGate 60F firewalls, one per store, with an SD-WAN overlay connecting the sites back to head office. Each store received six UniFi access points positioned after a peak-hour site survey, covering the retail floor, the stockroom and the customer seating area. The POS terminals were moved to a dedicated VLAN with a separate SSID, isolated from the guest Wi-Fi. Customer EFTPOS transactions were routed through the firewall's application control policy, which blocks traffic to known malicious IPs.

The monitoring platform now alerts us if any access point drops, if a POS terminal falls off the network, or if the primary NBN circuit degrades. The 4G backup circuit takes over automatically within ten seconds, so the store does not stop trading when the copper line fails. In the first six months, the store manager reported zero POS outages during peak trading.

What we would do differently

In hindsight, we should have surveyed the store during peak trading in the first week, not the third. The initial design covered the floor on a quiet Tuesday, but the Saturday lunchtime density exposed a coverage gap near the food court entrance. We added a seventh access point and re-tuned the channel plan. The lesson we took to later retail engagements is to survey during peak hours, not office hours.