The physical layer everything else depends on — Cat 6 and Cat 6A copper, fiber backbone and fusion splicing, server and network racks, enterprise and villa Wi-Fi, door access control and time attendance. Designed, installed, tested and labelled properly, so the next engineer who opens the rack can work out what is going on in under a minute.
IT infrastructure is the cabling, racks, switching, wireless and physical-access layer that everything else in your office runs on top of. A complete job covers a site survey and point count, structured cabling to a recognised standard (ANSI/TIA-568 or ISO/IEC 11801), a fiber backbone between floors or buildings, a properly built and ventilated rack, wireless design based on a survey rather than guesswork, and door access and attendance hardware wired back to the same infrastructure.
What separates a good install from a cheap one is not the cable brand. It is whether every link was tested and certified, whether both ends of every cable are labelled, whether there is an as-built drawing and port schedule you actually own, and whether the rack was built with room to grow. Those four things cost very little on the day and save an enormous amount every year afterwards. Nifty IT has delivered infrastructure projects across the UAE since 2014, quoted in AED and handed over with the paperwork.
Half the quotations circulating in Dubai offer “Cat 6e”. It is worth knowing exactly what you are being sold before you compare two prices that look identical.
| Category | Standard | Bandwidth | 10 Gigabit distance | Use it for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cat 5e | ANSI/TIA-568, legacy | 100 MHz | Not supported | Existing installations only — we do not install new Cat 5e |
| Cat 6 | ANSI/TIA/EIA-568-B.2-1 | 250 MHz | Up to 55 m | Standard office desk points, IP phones, printers, most access points |
| “Cat 6e” | Not a standard — marketing term | Undefined | Not defined | Nothing you can specify or certify against. See the note below |
| Cat 6A | ANSI/TIA-568.2-D | 500 MHz | Full 100 m | 10 Gigabit runs, Wi-Fi 6E/7 access points, PoE++ cameras, long links, backbone to floor switches |
About “Cat 6e”: ANSI/TIA-568 defines Category 6 and Category 6A. There is nothing in between. “Cat 6e” is a manufacturer marketing label with no agreed meaning — two cables sold as Cat 6e can have entirely different performance, and no test head in existence will certify a link to a “Cat 6e” standard because the standard does not exist. In practice, cable sold as Cat 6e in the UAE is usually Cat 6 with slightly better headroom. If a quotation says Cat 6e, ask which it actually is, priced as Cat 6, or step up to genuine Cat 6A and get a certificate that means something. We quote Cat 6 or Cat 6A, never anything in between, and we will happily supply Cat 6e-branded cable if you have already bought it — we will simply certify it as what it is.
Horizontal cabling is limited to a 90 m permanent link plus patch leads for a 100 m total channel, whatever the category. If a run exceeds that, the honest answer is fiber and a local switch — not a longer cable and hope.
One contractor for the whole physical layer. That matters more than it sounds: most infrastructure faults live in the gap between the cabling contractor, the network team and the security installer.
Full horizontal and backbone cabling to ANSI/TIA-568 and ISO/IEC 11801 — containment and trunking, floor boxes and faceplates, patch panels, dressing and labelling. Every link tested and certified, with results handed to you as a document rather than a verbal assurance.
New desk points, additional drops in a live office, camera and access-point drops, and clean re-terminations of the sprawl left behind by the last three fit-outs. Priced per point so you can see exactly what you are paying for.
Single-mode OS2 and multimode OM3/OM4 backbone between floors, buildings and warehouses. Fusion splicing, pigtails and LIU termination, OTDR and insertion-loss testing, and repairs to fiber cut by someone else's core drill — which is how most of our fiber calls start.
Wall-mount 6U to 12U for a comms cupboard, or full 42U floor-standing racks for a server room. Patch panels, cable managers, PDUs, UPS, shelving, earthing, ventilation and a layout that leaves space for the next two years of growth.
Survey-based access-point placement, channel and power planning, VLANs for staff, guest and devices, seamless roaming, and captive-portal guest access. Designed for the building you actually have, including the glass partitions and blockwork that the marketing coverage map ignored.
Full coverage across a Dubai villa — majlis, bedrooms across three floors, garden, pool area, driveway and staff quarters — on cabled access points rather than a chain of repeaters, with one network name that follows you through the house.
Hardware or cloud-managed controllers so every access point shares one configuration, one SSID set and one place to look when something is wrong. HPE Aruba, Fortinet FortiGate managing FortiAP, Huawei eKit and Ubiquiti UniFi, sized to the estate.
Card, fob, PIN, mobile credential and biometric readers on main entrances, server rooms and restricted areas — with magnetic locks or electric strikes, exit buttons, break-glass units and the fire-alarm interface the code requires. Multi-door systems managed from one console with a full audit trail.
ZKTeco and equivalent fingerprint, face-recognition and card terminals, configured with your shift patterns, and exported or integrated into payroll or HR — including Odoo HR where you already run it. Attendance data that reconciles, rather than a device nobody trusts.
Almost every bad wireless network in the UAE fails for one of four reasons, and none of them is the brand of access point.
Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 in the UAE — what the spectrum actually allows: The TDRA has released the lower portion of the 6 GHz band, 5925–6425 MHz, for indoor wireless use at low power. That is 500 MHz of clean spectrum and it is a genuine upgrade — but it is not the full 1200 MHz that some other markets, including Saudi Arabia, have opened. The practical consequence is that Wi-Fi 7's headline 320 MHz channels are heavily constrained here, and 6 GHz is indoor-only, so it will not help you cover a garden, a yard or a warehouse forecourt. Anyone selling you Wi-Fi 7 in the UAE on the promise of 320 MHz channels everywhere is quoting a different country's regulations. Confirm the current position with the TDRA before signing a specification that depends on it — spectrum policy moves.
A large UAE villa defeats consumer equipment for a specific reason: solid blockwork and concrete slabs between floors. A router in the study and two plug-in extenders will never cover it, no matter what the box claims.
Ceiling or wall access points on their own Cat 6A drops, one per floor zone, with the Etisalat or du router moved into bridge mode behind a proper gateway. Every extra repeater in a chain halves throughput; a cabled AP does not.
Weather-rated outdoor access points for the garden, pool deck, majlis annexe, driveway and gatehouse — the areas where a house network is usually at its worst and where the cameras and intercom happen to live.
Separate networks for family devices, guests, staff quarters and smart-home equipment, with parental controls and scheduling where you want them — all on one system rather than four unrelated boxes nobody can administer.
Villa work is quoted after a walk-through, because the honest number depends on floor area, wall construction, how many outdoor zones you want covered and whether cable can be routed without chasing walls. Occupied villas can usually be cabled through ceiling voids and existing conduit with minimal disruption — we will tell you at survey stage if yours cannot.
The same cabling infrastructure that carries your data carries your door readers and attendance terminals. Doing both on one project is cheaper, tidier and easier to support than bringing in a separate contractor after the ceiling has closed.
Networked controllers on main entrances, server rooms, stores, labs and restricted floors — with card and fob readers, PIN keypads, mobile credentials or biometrics depending on how much friction the door can take. Locking hardware sized to the door: magnetic locks for glass, electric strikes for timber, with exit buttons and break-glass units on the inside.
Everything reports to one console: who opened which door and when, access by time schedule and by group, instant revocation when someone leaves, and anti-passback where tailgating is a real concern.
Fingerprint, face-recognition and card terminals from ZKTeco and equivalent vendors, configured around your actual shift patterns rather than a default template — late and early marks, breaks, overtime rules, multiple sites and multiple shifts.
The data then has to go somewhere useful. We export to payroll or integrate directly with your HR system, including Odoo HR where you already run it, so attendance reconciles against payroll instead of being retyped by somebody on the last day of the month.
Two compliance points worth raising before you buy hardware. First, fire safety: under the UAE Fire and Life Safety Code of Practice, access-controlled doors on escape routes must release on fire-alarm activation and on loss of power, which means the locking hardware has to be interfaced to the fire panel and specified fail-safe or fail-secure correctly per door. Confirm the detail for your building with the project's Civil Defence consultant — it is not a decision to make on site. Second, security-system regulation: in Dubai, security systems fall under the remit of the Security Industry Regulatory Agency (SIRA), and depending on your premises and the scope of works, design approval and a SIRA-licensed contractor may be required. Nifty IT does not claim SIRA licensing on this page; where your scope requires it, we scope and deliver the IT infrastructure and work alongside a SIRA-licensed security contractor rather than pretending the requirement is not there.
We walk the site — or read your fit-out drawing if the site does not exist yet — and produce a point count, access-point layout, rack position, containment route and any constraint we can see coming: an inaccessible ceiling, a run over 90 m, a comms cupboard with no ventilation, a landlord who will not permit core drilling.
Priced per data point, per access point, per door and per rack, with materials and labour separated and the exclusions stated. If the honest answer is that you need fewer points and a better switch than the drawing suggests, we will put that in the quote rather than sell the larger number.
Containment, cable pulling, termination and rack build — coordinated with your fit-out contractor, and phased or done out of hours in an occupied office so nobody loses a working day. Live-office additions are routine; we do not need the floor empty.
Every copper link certified and every fiber core loss-tested, with failures re-terminated and re-tested rather than quietly passed over. Both ends of every cable labelled to a consistent scheme, patch panels numbered, and the results compiled into a document.
Switches, controller, wireless SSIDs and VLANs, access-control doors and attendance terminals configured and tested with you present. You receive test results, a port schedule, an as-built drawing, the IP scheme and every device credential. Ongoing support is available under a support contract or on a per-visit basis — there is no requirement to buy one to have the work done.
Offices, retail units, clinics, warehouses and villas across Business Bay, DIFC, Al Quoz, Jebel Ali, Dubai Silicon Oasis, DMCC, Deira and Bur Dubai, plus villa communities including Arabian Ranches, Jumeirah, Emirates Hills and Dubai Hills.
Office fit-outs and industrial sites in Mussafah, KIZAD, Al Reem, Yas Island and the city centre, with the same survey, certification and handover process as our Dubai projects.
Sharjah industrial areas and free zones, plus Ajman, Ras Al Khaimah, Umm Al Quwain and Fujairah — typically warehouse and labour-accommodation Wi-Fi, factory cabling and multi-building fiber links.
Cabling is quoted per data point, and the figure is driven by cable category, the average run length, how difficult the route is, whether containment already exists and how much of the work has to happen outside business hours. A straight run through an accessible ceiling void in an empty shell costs a fraction of the same point chased through blockwork in an occupied office at night. Quantity matters too — the per-point rate falls sharply above about fifty points because the mobilisation cost is spread. Beware any quotation that gives a single per-point price without stating category, testing and labelling: those three omissions are exactly where a cheap number comes from.
Cat 6 is defined at 250 MHz and carries 10 Gigabit Ethernet to about 55 metres. Cat 6A is defined at 500 MHz and carries 10 Gigabit to the full 100 metres, with better resistance to interference from neighbouring cables in a bundle and better heat behaviour under high-wattage PoE. Cat 6e is not a standard at all — ANSI/TIA-568 defines Category 6 and Category 6A with nothing in between, and no test equipment can certify a link as "Cat 6e" because there is no specification to certify against. It is a manufacturer marketing term, usually applied to Cat 6 cable with some extra headroom. If a quotation offers Cat 6e, ask whether you are being charged Cat 6A money for Cat 6 cable.
A useful working rule for an office fit-out is two points per desk, plus points for each printer or multifunction device, each access point, each camera, each access-controlled door, each meeting-room display and each wall clock or signage screen — then add roughly twenty per cent spare capacity, terminated and patched, for the changes that arrive within the first year. Spare points are the cheapest thing in the entire project on the day the cabling team is already on site, and among the most expensive afterwards. Send us your floor plan and we will mark up a point count at no charge.
Yes, and most of our cabling work is exactly that rather than empty-shell fit-outs. Work is phased zone by zone, routed through ceiling voids, existing containment and floor boxes wherever possible, and noisy or disruptive activity is scheduled for evenings or weekends. Rack changes and switch cutovers are done out of hours so nobody arrives to a dead network. We will tell you at survey stage which parts genuinely cannot be done around your staff — usually core drilling and any chasing of walls.
The standards allow a 90 metre permanent link from the patch panel to the outlet, plus patch leads at each end, for a 100 metre total channel. That limit applies to every copper category — a longer Cat 6A run does not become valid because the cable is better. Past that distance the correct answer is a fiber link to a local switch or an intermediate comms point, not a longer cable, a repeater or a cheap extender. If your building has runs that cannot be reached inside 90 metres, we design in a second distribution point at survey stage rather than discovering the problem at testing.
Almost always because a single consumer router is trying to cover solid blockwork and concrete slabs, with plug-in extenders making it worse — each repeater hop roughly halves throughput and adds another network name for devices to cling to. The fix is cabled access points, one per floor zone plus outdoor units for garden, pool and gate, all on a single network name with proper roaming. In most UAE villas the cabling can be routed through ceiling voids, service ducts and existing conduit without chasing walls; we confirm that at the walk-through and tell you honestly if your villa is one of the ones where it cannot.
We design and deploy on HPE Aruba, Fortinet FortiAP managed directly from a FortiGate firewall, Huawei eKit, and Ubiquiti UniFi, choosing by site rather than by preference. A thirty-user office with an existing FortiGate is usually best served by FortiAPs on the same console; a multi-floor corporate estate suits Aruba; a villa or small retail unit rarely justifies more than UniFi. Controllers can be hardware, on-premise software or cloud-managed — what matters is that every access point shares one configuration and one place to look when something breaks, rather than eight units configured individually by whoever installed them.
Security systems in Dubai fall under the remit of the Security Industry Regulatory Agency (SIRA), and depending on your premises, your building's requirements and the scope of works, design approval and a SIRA-licensed contractor may be required — particularly where access control sits alongside CCTV or covers a building's main security perimeter. Nifty IT does not claim SIRA licensing: we scope and deliver the IT infrastructure, cabling and network integration, and work alongside a SIRA-licensed security contractor where your scope requires one. Confirm your specific obligation with SIRA or your building management before ordering hardware, because retrofitting an approval is considerably more painful than planning for it.
Yes. Attendance terminals are configured around your real shift patterns, grace periods, break rules and overtime policy, and the resulting data is either exported in a format your payroll accepts or integrated directly with your HR system — including Odoo HR, which we develop on. The integration is the part that determines whether the system is trusted: an attendance device whose output somebody retypes into a spreadsheet at month end will be abandoned within a year. Tell us what runs your payroll at survey stage so the terminals are specified to suit it.
Yes, and it is how most of our fiber calls begin — a contractor's core drill through a riser, a duct caught during landscaping, or a patch lead crushed behind a rack. We locate the break, fusion splice the affected cores, re-terminate into the LIU where needed and loss-test the repaired link before handing it back, rather than re-pulling an entire run. Where the same route has been damaged more than once, we will say so and recommend re-routing or additional protection instead of splicing the same duct a third time.
Every copper link we install is certified and every fiber core is loss-tested, and the results are handed to you as a document along with the port schedule, labelling scheme and as-built drawing. Workmanship is warranted for the period stated in your contract, and where a project is built entirely on a single manufacturer's certified component set, an extended manufacturer system warranty can be arranged — that route has to be specified before installation begins, not requested afterwards, so raise it at quotation stage if you want it. Ask any cabling contractor for sample test results before you appoint them; the ones who do not test will change the subject.
Yes, and it is the main reason clients use us for infrastructure rather than three separate contractors. Access-point drops, camera drops, door readers and attendance terminals all sit on the same structured cabling, share the same containment and terminate in the same rack, so doing them together removes duplicate mobilisation, duplicate ceiling access and the finger-pointing that starts when a door reader will not talk to a network somebody else installed. You get one survey, one itemised quotation, one handover pack and one number to call afterwards. There is no obligation to take a support contract with the installation.
A free site survey gives you a marked-up point count, an access-point layout, a rack position and an itemised AED quotation. No charge, no obligation, and useful for comparing any other quotation you have on the table.
NIFTY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LLC · Burj Nahar Mall, M2 Floor, Office D2-4, Deira, Dubai · 04 355 1136 · [email protected]