28 February 2026 · 12 min read · Arviteni
Network infrastructure is the foundation everything else depends on in a care home. This guide covers the real cost of enterprise vs mid-market networking equipment, why licensing models matter more than hardware prices, and how SD-WAN is changing the economics for multi-site care groups.
Every care system your organisation depends on runs on the network. Electronic care records, video calls with families, medication management, staff scheduling, online training, nurse call dashboards, CCTV. When the network fails, it is not an IT problem in a back office somewhere. Care delivery is directly affected.
A medication round stalls because the eMAR system cannot reach the pharmacy database. A safeguarding video call with the local authority drops mid-sentence. A new starter cannot complete their mandatory training because the e-learning platform buffers endlessly. These are not hypothetical scenarios. They happen in care homes every week, and the root cause is almost always the same: network infrastructure that was never designed for what is being asked of it.
Our Wi-Fi guide for care homes covers the wireless side: access point placement, coverage design, and network segmentation basics. This article goes deeper into the infrastructure decisions underneath the Wi-Fi: the equipment you choose, the licensing models you commit to, and the architecture that connects multiple sites. These decisions determine not just whether your network works today, but what it costs you over the next five years.
When a care organisation invests in network infrastructure, the hardware price is only part of the story. For many enterprise networking vendors, the real cost is in the licensing.
Cisco Meraki is one of the most widely deployed cloud-managed networking platforms in the UK. The hardware is excellent and the dashboard is intuitive. But every Meraki device requires an active licence to function. Not just to access the management dashboard, but to operate at all. If a Meraki licence expires, the device stops passing traffic until you pay.
A typical care home deployment of a security appliance, a couple of switches, and six to eight access points might carry £3,000 to £6,000 in annual licence fees. Scale that across a 10-home care group and you are looking at £30,000 to £60,000 per year just for the right to use equipment you have already purchased.
HPE Aruba and Juniper Mist follow similar models. Cloud management and AI-driven analytics are compelling, but the recurring subscription costs compound over time. These platforms were designed for organisations with hundreds of access points and dedicated network engineering teams. They are built for airports, universities, and hospital trusts.
The challenge for mid-sized care groups is that they need enterprise reliability without enterprise costs. A 10-home care group needs VLAN segmentation, quality of service, and centralised visibility across every site. What it does not need is a licensing model designed for a multinational corporation.
This is one of the most common IT licensing traps we see in the care sector. Organisations end up paying for capabilities they will never use, locked into renewal cycles that grow more expensive each year, because the initial purchase decision focused on hardware features rather than total cost of ownership.
Ubiquiti's UniFi platform has become the networking platform of choice for a growing number of care providers, and the reason is straightforward: it delivers enterprise-grade networking without annual licensing fees.
The UniFi Network Controller, which provides centralised management, device monitoring, analytics, and configuration, is included at no additional cost. You buy the hardware, deploy it, and manage it through a dashboard comparable to what Meraki and Aruba offer. There is no annual subscription. The equipment continues to work, receive firmware updates, and report analytics without a recurring fee.
This is not a stripped-down product. UniFi access points support seamless roaming, VLAN tagging, and band steering. UniFi switches provide Power over Ethernet and traffic monitoring. The Dream Machine Pro and Cloud Gateway series handle routing, firewall rules, VPN connectivity, and SD-WAN, all from the same dashboard.
The analytics are genuinely useful. You can see every connected device, bandwidth consumption by application, and where connectivity issues are occurring. When a care manager reports that the eMAR system is slow, you can identify whether it is a coverage issue, a bandwidth contention problem, or something on the server side within minutes.
We deployed UniFi across a care group headquarters, replacing legacy enterprise equipment that was costing tens of thousands in annual licensing. The switchover was completed over a weekend with zero downtime. Annual licensing costs were eliminated entirely, and the savings were redirected to frontline technology improvements across the care homes.
UniFi works well for mid-sized care organisations with a competent IT partner managing the infrastructure. It is right-sized for care groups operating 5 to 50 sites. The management dashboard scales well across multiple locations, and the hardware is reliable, well-supported through community and partner channels, and significantly less expensive to own over a five-year period than any enterprise alternative.
Very large environments with thousands of access points and requirements for vendor-backed SLA support may still benefit from enterprise platforms. For most care groups in the UK, that threshold is well above what they operate.
The other consideration is support. Ubiquiti does not offer the same vendor phone support as Cisco or HPE. No licence fees means no funded support desk. It works well when the organisation has an IT partner who knows the platform. It works less well if the network is managed by a single internal IT generalist with no networking background.
If your care group operates more than one home, the way those sites connect to each other and to central systems is one of the most significant cost and performance decisions in your IT estate.
Traditional wide area networking (WAN) connects multiple sites using dedicated circuits, often MPLS or leased lines, provided by a single telecoms provider. These connections are reliable but expensive, and bandwidth is limited compared to standard broadband. A managed WAN circuit delivering 50Mbps might cost £300 to £500 per month. A full-fibre broadband connection delivering 500Mbps to the same address might cost £40 to £80 per month.
SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) replaces dedicated circuits with standard broadband connections, then uses software to create secure, intelligent links between sites. Encrypted tunnels connect each site to every other site and to central systems. If one connection is congested or drops, traffic reroutes automatically through an alternative path.
In practical terms, a care group can connect 12 homes using full-fibre broadband at each site, secured with encrypted tunnels, managed from a single dashboard, and paying a fraction of what a managed WAN would cost.
We designed and deployed an SD-WAN architecture across 12 care homes that had been running on a legacy managed WAN for over five years. The managed WAN was costing over £5,400 per month across all sites. Bandwidth was capped at 50Mbps at most homes, with some still on 20Mbps connections.
The replacement: full-fibre broadband at every home delivering up to 500Mbps, connected through SD-WAN with intelligent routing, all on standardised Ubiquiti equipment. Monthly network costs dropped to under £1,620. That is a 70% reduction, saving over £45,000 per year.
Bandwidth increased tenfold. Electronic care records load instantly. Video calls with families are reliable. Medication rounds run smoothly even during shift handovers when a dozen tablets sync at once. The network went from being a constraint on care delivery to being invisible in the best possible way.
One of the most significant operational benefits of SD-WAN on a unified platform is centralised management. Every access point, switch, and gateway across every care home is visible in a single dashboard. Network health, device status, and bandwidth usage are monitored in real time.
When a care home manager calls to say the Wi-Fi is slow, the IT team can see what is happening at that site before the call ends. If a broadband connection drops, SD-WAN reroutes traffic through the backup connection and the IT team is notified while care delivery continues uninterrupted. That level of visibility across a dispersed estate would traditionally require expensive monitoring tools and dedicated network engineering staff. With the right platform, it is built in.
Whether you choose enterprise or mid-market equipment, the principles of good network design in a care environment are the same.
Every care home network should separate traffic into isolated segments. At minimum:
Segmentation is not a nice-to-have. It is directly relevant to DSPT compliance and Cyber Essentials certification. A flat network where a visitor's phone sits on the same segment as your care record system is a security risk no compliance framework will overlook.
Not all traffic is equal. Quality of Service (QoS) rules ensure that care-critical applications take precedence over background updates and general browsing.
In practice, this means the eMAR system continues working smoothly during a medication round even if staff are streaming training videos and residents are browsing the internet. Without QoS, everything competes equally for bandwidth, and the medication round loses.
When the internet goes down in a care home with digital records, care delivery is immediately affected. Every care home should have:
The CQC expects to see that you have considered what happens when technology fails. Digital dependency with no contingency is a concern under the "Well-led" key question.
The difference between a well-managed network and a problematic one is whether someone knows about issues before care staff report them. Proactive monitoring means the IT team sees a degrading connection or a failing access point before it affects care delivery.
This requires the right tools and the right process. If your managed IT provider is not proactively monitoring your network, they are waiting for problems rather than preventing them.
If your care group is running aging network infrastructure, or paying enterprise licensing costs that no longer make sense, here is how to approach a refresh.
Start by documenting what you have. Every router, switch, access point, and firewall across every site, with vendor, model, age, and licensing status. Then pull together the full cost picture: hardware, licensing, broadband circuits, and managed service fees. The total is often higher than anyone expected, because the costs are spread across multiple invoices and budget lines.
Before committing to changes, check contract terms. Managed WAN contracts often have 12 to 36 month terms with early termination penalties. Meraki licences are typically prepaid for one, three, or five years. Timing your refresh to align with contract end dates avoids paying twice during a transition.
Hardware price is the smallest part of the decision. A Ubiquiti access point costs £100 to £300. A comparable Meraki access point costs £300 to £700 plus £100 to £200 per year in licensing. Over five years, the Ubiquiti device costs £100 to £300 total. The Meraki device costs £800 to £1,700. Multiply that across every device in every home and the difference is significant.
Do not attempt to refresh every home simultaneously. Start with one site as a pilot, run new infrastructure alongside the existing network, validate thoroughly, then roll out in phases. This was exactly the approach used in the 12-home SD-WAN deployment: a pilot site ran for two weeks before the wider rollout began, and every deployment included a documented rollback plan.
Modern care homes depend on cloud services. Microsoft 365, cloud-hosted care record systems, online training platforms, and hosted telephony all require reliable, well-configured network infrastructure. A network refresh is the right time to ensure that your broadband, QoS, and resilience are designed to support the cloud services your organisation depends on.
That is the point. The best network infrastructure is the kind nobody thinks about. Care workers pick up a tablet and the care record loads. A family member calls and the video is clear. A manager runs a report and the data is there. Nothing buffers, nothing drops, nothing frustrates.
Getting to that point requires good decisions about equipment, licensing, architecture, and ongoing management. It means choosing platforms right-sized for your organisation, not paying enterprise premiums for capabilities you will never use. It means designing for resilience, segmentation, and the specific demands of a care environment where connectivity directly affects the quality of care people receive.
The network is the foundation. Everything your care organisation does with technology depends on it. Getting the foundation right is not glamorous, but it changes everything that sits on top of it.
If your care group is reviewing its network infrastructure, our managed IT service includes network assessment, design, and deployment for care organisations. We help care providers build networks that support modern care delivery, meet compliance requirements, and cost less to run than the infrastructure they replace.