One low-voltage standard, deployable at any of 300 restaurants.
The client operated a mix of legacy Aloha and Micros POS environments across 300 restaurants, on aging infrastructure that had been added to piecemeal for a decade. Their goal: migrate the fleet to Toast, add WiFi 6 coverage that could carry guest, handheld, KDS and IoT traffic, put PoE cameras on every site with cloud-managed access control on office and delivery doors — and do it all without disrupting a single service window.
Access Cabling engineered a single standardized rack elevation and site-in-a-box kit that could be deployed at any location, then built a 9-month rollout schedule with overnight cutover windows, prefab racks shipped from our California warehouse, and a single PM owning the entire program.
Every site was Fluke-certified, photographed, and documented into a per-store closeout package the brand's IT team could hand to any future contractor, auditor or franchisee.
Migrate 300 mixed-POS restaurants to a common Toast + WiFi 6 + cameras + access-control standard without disrupting lunch, dinner or drive-thru service.
Standardized rack elevation, prefab site kits, overnight cutovers, single-PM ownership and Fluke certification on every drop across a single 9-month program.
300 sites live, zero missed openings, 99.7% first-pass certification, PCI scope reduced and a repeatable playbook for every new store the brand opens.
POS, WiFi, cameras and access control — cabled as one coordinated stack.
Every low-voltage system a modern restaurant depends on landed on the same structured cabling and the same back-office rack — installed by one crew, certified to one standard, warrantied by one contractor.
Cat6 plenum drops to every Toast Flex terminal, KDS screen, kitchen printer, kiosk and back-office server. Dedicated POS VLAN cross-connected on the same rack as the ISP handoff and SD-WAN edge, sized for PCI scope reduction.
PoE-capable Cat6 to expo, grill, fry and pass-through KDS screens, plus dedicated runs to Epson TM-U220 / TM-m30 kitchen printers — routed above the ceiling grid and out of grease and wash-down zones.
Predictive Ekahau heat maps per floor plan, Cat6A drops to WiFi 6 APs over dining, kitchen, drive-thru, patio and back-of-house — segmented into Guest, Staff-Handhelds, POS, KDS and IoT SSIDs.
12–24 PoE cameras per site covering dining room, POS/cash drawers, kitchen line, drive-thru window, walk-ins, rear exits and parking — cabled to a labeled camera patch field and NVR in the back-office rack.
Cloud-managed access control (Openpath/Avigilon Alta and Brivo) on office, storage, walk-in and rear delivery doors — low-voltage runs, REX motions, door position switches and maglock/strike power on a dedicated 12/24 VDC supply.
OSP-rated cabling for HME EOS|HD and PAR Drive-Thru Timer base stations, order confirmation boards, menu boards, vehicle detection loops and headset chargers on drive-thru sites.
Single-mode fiber between MDF/IDF where floor plans required it, plus clean handoffs from primary ISP and LTE/5G failover into the SD-WAN edge for zero-touch site turn-up.
Wall-mount cabinet with patch panels, PoE+ switch stack, SD-WAN edge, NVR, access-control controller and UPS — labeled and photographed for the closeout package.
Toast rollout on a PCI-aware VLAN — with a clean migration from Aloha & Micros.
Toast's install standard calls for Cat5e or better hardwired to every terminal, KDS, kitchen printer and the Toast router. Access Cabling installed Cat6 plenum as the minimum, Cat6A on the MDF/IDF backbone and on any KDS run that might carry PoE+, terminated on a dedicated Toast patch panel field cross-connected to a PoE+ switch in the back-office rack.
Legacy Aloha and Micros terminals stayed hot on their old cabling until the new Toast VLAN was proven in the same overnight window. That let sites open the next morning on Toast, with the old POS available as a fallback for the first 24–48 hours before demo.
- Toast (new standard)
- NCR Aloha / Voyix (legacy, migrated)
- Oracle MICROS Simphony (legacy)
- Square for Restaurants (test bank)
Predictive heat maps, Cat6A drops, five segmented SSIDs.
Every location started with an Ekahau predictive design against the actual floor plan and seating density — not a rule-of-thumb AP count. That drove exact AP placement across dining room, kitchen, drive-thru, patio and back-of-house, with Cat6A runs sized for WiFi 6 today and WiFi 7 tomorrow.
On top of that physical infrastructure, the brand's IT partner provisioned five segmented SSIDs: Guest, Staff Handhelds, POS/KDS, Cameras, and IoT — each on its own VLAN, with guest traffic fully isolated from anything payment-adjacent.
Cabled into the same rack, warrantied by the same crew.
Each site received 12–24 PoE cameras: dining and order counter, POS/cash drawer, kitchen line, drive-thru window and vehicle approach, walk-ins, rear exits and parking. Every camera landed on a dedicated camera patch field and PoE+ switch in the back-office rack, with on-site NVR and optional cloud recording.
Access control covered 3–5 doors per site — office, manager, walk-in cooler/freezer, rear delivery, and (where applicable) drive-thru back door — cabled to cloud-managed head-ends from Openpath/Avigilon Alta, Brivo, Kisi or Genea depending on the brand's standard. Because Access Cabling holds both C-7 and C-10 licenses, the same crew pulled the dedicated door power circuits.
What made 300 sites in 9 months actually work.
Standardized survey checklist, photo package and Ekahau predictive design captured per site so every buildout starts from the same baseline.
Back-office racks pre-built and tested at our California warehouse — patch panels, PoE switch, SD-WAN, NVR, UPS and labels — shipped to site as one unit.
10 PM to 6 AM cutover windows so lunch, dinner and drive-thru service were never interrupted. Old POS stayed hot until new POS was proven.
One Access Cabling project manager owned the entire 300-site rollout — a single point of contact for the brand's IT, ops and construction teams.
Every drop Fluke DSX-certified, results archived per site, deficiencies fixed before cutover — first-pass certification finished at 99.7%.
Physical and logical separation between POS, Guest WiFi, cameras and IoT to keep the PCI DSS scope tight and audit-ready across the fleet.
Per-site closeout package: rack photos, cable schedule, port map, Ekahau report, access-control door schedule and warranty registration.
Post-cutover, sites route infrastructure tickets to a single Access Cabling queue with a 4-hour on-site SLA in metros and next-flight-out elsewhere.
A repeatable low-voltage standard the brand now owns.
- 300 sites live with zero missed openings
- 99.7% first-pass Fluke certification
- Average site cutover completed in a single overnight window
- PCI DSS scope reduced by isolating POS/KDS on a dedicated VLAN
- Cameras and access control unified onto the same structured cabling
- Standard rack elevation deployable in 6–8 hours per site