★Commercial · Service

MDU & Multi-Tenant Networking · Kansas City.

IntegrateIT does structured cabling and networking for multifamily buildings in Kansas City, Missouri and Overland Park, Kansas. We are an Overland Park, Kansas integrator founded in 2021 by Daniel and Moran Alon: Control4 Platinum Dealer with a Control4 Certified Showroom, Crestron Elite Partner, Lutron Certified Dealer, CEDIA member, HTA Certified, BBB-accredited. We design and install network infrastructure for apartments, condominiums, office suites and mixed-use developments across the whole metro on both sides of the state line — downtown and the Crossroads, the Northland and the Missouri suburbs, Overland Park, Leawood, Lenexa and Olathe in Johnson County: single-mode fiber backbone, structured copper to every unit, managed PoE switching, and tenant Wi-Fi that keeps every tenant’s traffic to itself. Ubiquiti UniFi throughout, from boutique buildings to large tenant counts. A building network is a building system, not an amenity you add at lease-up, so the ownership decision is made before a riser is cored. What a buyer can verify before signing: certification results per unit drop, a riser diagram and cable schedule, the VLAN and addressing plan, admin credentials issued to the building, and a five-year workmanship warranty on our labor. Phone: (913) 804-7575 or office@integrateit.tech.

Below: the ownership decision that has to happen before the pathway is built, what tenant Wi-Fi actually has to do, why a converted Crossroads warehouse and a new Lenexa wrap building are opposite problems, what we install, and the handover that decides whether the network is still working in year five.

Decide who owns the network before you core the riser

A bad building network frequently started as a good building with the ownership question unanswered. The pathway got built for whatever the electrical drawings implied, the developer sold the asset, and the network became whatever a series of individual residents could arrange for themselves. By then the decision has been made by default, and reversing it means opening finished corridors.

There are three honest models, and they trade against each other. Carrier-owned, per unit: the building provides conduit and a demarcation room, every resident signs their own service, and the building spends nothing and controls nothing. Cheapest to build, and the resident’s experience belongs to somebody else. Building-owned and managed: one circuit in, one managed network out, internet included in the lease. The building controls quality and can market it, and takes on an operating cost and a support obligation it did not have before. Hybrid: the building owns amenity, common-area and back-of-house networking, and residents still buy their own unit service. Less operating burden, less differentiation, and it is the model that ages best in a building with a small staff and a long hold.

We are not doctrinaire about which one you pick. We are firm that it gets picked early, because it changes the count of intermediate closets, the size of the copper pull, whether fiber runs to the unit or only to the floor, and how much conditioned closet space the architect has to protect. That conversation belongs in design development alongside the rest of the low-voltage scope — the same argument we make to builders on new-construction low-voltage projects.

What tenant Wi-Fi actually has to do

A house has one household and a handful of coverage problems. A building has a hundred households sharing the same spectrum through walls, and the hard part is not coverage — it is keeping a hundred networks from stepping on each other. Three things have to be true at once.

• Isolation that is structural, not a password. Each tenant on their own VLAN, so a resident sees their own devices and nothing on the other side of the wall. Amenity spaces on a separate guest network with client isolation. Cameras, readers and building controls on a management lane with no unnecessary route out.
• Density planned down, not up. The instinct is to add access points and turn the power up. In a building that is exactly backwards: high-power radios reach further, so every unit hears more neighbors and the usable spectrum shrinks for everybody. We design with more access points at lower power, tighter channel reuse and band steering, so a device connects to the radio nearest it rather than the loudest one two floors away.
• Roaming that survives a corridor. Residents walk from the unit to the elevator to the garage on a call. That handoff has to happen without the device clinging to the access point it woke up on, which is a configuration problem more than a hardware one, and it is the most common complaint in buildings that were wired by a general electrician rather than designed.

The other decision worth arguing about early is where the access point lives. A ceiling-mounted access point inside the unit gives the best coverage and needs a cable and a penetration in a finished ceiling. An in-wall access point at the data jack is far less invasive and gives up some range. A corridor access point covering several units is the cheapest and is the first thing to disappoint in a masonry building. Which one a project gets is a function of the wall construction, and we will say plainly when the cheap answer is going to generate service calls.

Kansas City has two kinds of multifamily building, and they are opposite problems

The metro’s multifamily stock splits cleanly. On one side are the brick-and-timber conversions downtown, in the Crossroads and the West Bottoms, and the older courtyard buildings on the Missouri side. These were not built with a telecom riser. Party walls are heavy masonry, the floor structure is often the finished ceiling, and radio does not pass through it. Coverage has to be planned unit by unit, vertical pathway has to be found or created in coordination with the structural engineer, and anything that cannot be concealed becomes a detailing conversation with the architect rather than something stapled to a beam after the fact. These buildings also tend to have exactly one plausible route between floors, which makes that route the entire design.

On the other side are the newer garden-style and wrap buildings in Lenexa, Olathe and south Overland Park. Light wood framing lets radio through easily, so per-unit coverage is rarely the problem. Distance is. The far stack of a long wrap building is a long way from the main equipment room, which means intermediate closets, fiber between them, and a conversation with the developer about giving up leasable square footage for conditioned closet space — much cheaper in design development than in framing. Podium construction adds a third case, because the concrete deck between the garage and the residential levels is a radio boundary and has to be treated as one rather than discovered during punch.

What we install

• Fiber backbone, OS2 single-mode. Riser-to-riser and IDF-to-MDF, fusion-spliced, tested and documented, and sized so the building is not re-pulled when the circuit is upgraded.
• Structured copper to every unit and suite. Cat6a plenum, terminated and certified rather than assumed, with more drops in office suites than in apartments because offices grow into them.
• VLAN-segregated tenant Wi-Fi. A dedicated lane per tenant with bandwidth shaping, and either a captive portal or a per-unit key — whichever suits how the property actually leases.
• Amenity and common-area coverage. Lobby, fitness, pool deck, coworking and conference on their own guest network, with the scheduling and key rotation the property needs.
• Managed PoE switching, one budget. Access points, cameras, door readers and signage on the same switching plant, rather than four vendors bringing four racks and blaming each other.
• Monitored, with a written response commitment. We watch the network remotely, we see failures before the leasing office does, and response terms are in the agreement rather than implied.

The handover decides whether it lasts

Building networks rarely fail as hardware. They fail as institutional memory. The development team moves to the next project, the property manager changes twice, and by year three nobody on site can say what is in the closet, which circuit belongs to whom, or who to call. So we treat closeout as deliverable work: labeled cabling with the test results handed over, an as-built rack elevation and port map, documented addressing and VLAN structure, and a training session with the people who will actually be standing in the building.

The owner holds the administrative credentials — not us. That matters more than it sounds. A building whose integrator holds the only keys cannot change integrators without a rebuild, and we do not want to be that vendor. If the property later brings management in-house or hires someone else, everything required to do it cleanly is already in their hands. Our workmanship carries a five-year warranty, the equipment carries its manufacturer warranty, and you have our support for as long as you own the system. Single-tenancy commercial work — one office, one clinic, one restaurant back-of-house — lives on our commercial networking page, the camera and access side is on commercial surveillance and access, and the single-family version of this work, where the household is the only tenant, is whole-home Wi-Fi.

Common questions