One Company, Multiple Solutions: The OneTek Story

Drive onto a business estate in Cheshire and here's what you might not realise.

The fibre broadband connecting every unit? One company built that. The CCTV cameras watching the perimeter? Same company. The ANPR logging every vehicle in and out? Them again. The sensors being installed to measure air quality at street level? Still them. The cloud phone system the office manager is using to chase a late delivery? Yes, same company.

That company is OneTek. And the reason everything works together isn't luck. It's because one team designed, installed, and manages all of it.

This is the story of how a small IT support firm in Cheshire ended up running the complete technology infrastructure for estates, factories, and communities across the North West and beyond.

It started with a problem nobody else would touch

In 2008, OneTek was doing what a lot of small IT companies do: supporting local businesses with their networks, phones, and day-to-day technology headaches. Good, reliable work, but not particularly unusual.

What changed things was an industrial estate in Winsford. The businesses there needed proper connectivity, but the existing options were slow, unreliable, and nobody was willing to invest in fixing them. Traditional providers looked at the estate layout, the cost of cabling, and walked away.

OneTek didn't.

In 2011, the team designed and built a wireless network across the entire estate, connecting businesses with fast, reliable broadband where none had existed before. That single decision set the direction for everything that followed. Not because of the technology itself, but because of the principle behind it: if a client has a problem that needs solving, find a way to solve it. Don't pass it to someone else.

Each solution led to the next

Once the network was in place at Winsford, the businesses wanted CCTV. Rather than bring in a separate security company to lay their own cables and run their own systems, OneTek integrated cameras directly onto the existing network. By 2012, the estate had both broadband and surveillance running on the same infrastructure, managed by the same team.

That CCTV system led to ANPR. Estate managers wanted to know which vehicles were coming and going, not just for security but for reporting and management. By 2015, OneTek was deploying number plate recognition alongside its cameras, tracking vehicle movements and giving estate managers data they'd never had before.

The network that started as a broadband solution was now carrying internet, CCTV, and ANPR data. Because OneTek had built all of it, there were no gaps between systems and no finger-pointing between providers when something needed fixing.

Then in 2018, that same approach scaled into something much bigger. OneTek deployed district-wide fibre and public Wi-Fi across Manchester's Gay Village, just in time for Manchester Pride. The project, branded GleeFi, delivered ultrafast fibre broadband at over 900 Mbps to local venues and businesses, with public Wi-Fi speeds exceeding 600 Mbps. The Manchester Evening News called it the fastest Wi-Fi in Europe. The kind of project that would normally involve half a dozen contractors became a single, joined-up deployment.

By 2022, the surveillance side of the business had grown to large-scale estate systems: 40+ cameras at a single site, hundreds of thousands of vehicle movements tracked monthly, and AI-assisted monitoring that could flag incidents in real time rather than relying on someone watching a screen.

From estates to factory floors

The manufacturing work came about the way most of OneTek's capabilities have: a customer had a problem.

A manufacturer in the North West needed their shop-floor equipment talking to their business management systems. The older machines on the production line were doing their jobs perfectly well, but the data they produced was trapped. Production managers were walking the floor with clipboards, updating spreadsheets by hand, and the management team had no real-time view of what was actually happening downstairs.

OneTek applied the same integration approach that had worked on estates. Connect what's already there. Bridge the gap between older equipment and modern systems. Give people a single view of their operation without forcing them to rip out and replace kit that still works.

The result was a factory integration solution that pulls data from PLCs, production controllers, and legacy equipment into one place, so manufacturers can see what's happening from the shop floor to the boardroom. OneTek now delivers this as a core capability alongside its estate and infrastructure work.

What OneTek actually does today

Today, the company works across four areas. They overlap in practice, but each serves a different type of customer.

OneTek is the core service provider. Managed networks, cloud phone systems, fibre broadband, CCTV, and IT support. If you're a business that needs reliable technology from a single provider, this is where you start.

Smart Place applies those same capabilities at estate scale. CCTV, ANPR, air quality sensors, and carbon monitoring, all combined into a management platform for BIDs, business parks, and public spaces. It's already running across estates in Winsford, Gadbrook Park, and West Chester.

Factory integration connects shop-floor equipment to business systems. Older machines, modern production controllers, entire production lines, all feeding into a single dashboard that shows what's actually happening in the factory. No more clipboards. No more guesswork.

GleeFi is the community connectivity brand. Born from the Manchester Gay Village deployment, it delivers ultrafast public Wi-Fi and fibre broadband to communities, venues, and events. It's the proof of what happens when you give a neighbourhood proper connectivity instead of waiting for the big providers to get around to it.

Four different types of customer. One team behind all of it. That's not a marketing line. The engineer who manages your network is part of the same team that monitors your CCTV and supports your phone system. When something needs attention, there's one number to call.

Why that matters

There's a practical reason this approach works better than the alternative.

When your phone system, your network, your internet connection, and your CCTV are all managed by different companies, every problem becomes a conversation about whose responsibility it is. The phones are dropping calls: is it the phone provider's fault or the network provider's? The CCTV footage is patchy: is it the cameras or the broadband? You end up spending more time coordinating between providers than actually getting things fixed.

When one team manages everything, that conversation disappears. OneTek can trace a problem from the software right down to the cable in the ground and fix it, because they built and manage all of it.

For business estate managers and BIDs, this matters even more. A Smart Place deployment isn't a CCTV project bolted onto a broadband contract. It's cameras, sensors, ANPR, and analytics, all designed and managed as one system. That's how you get 98% uptime across 56 cameras on an industrial estate without a room full of different vendor support tickets.

It's also why OneTek works well for businesses that have a mix of older and newer technology. Rather than forcing you to rip out what you already have, OneTek connects what's there with what's new. That's true whether it's upgrading an estate's ageing CCTV or linking a 20-year-old machine on a factory floor to a modern management system.

Built by solving problems

OneTek's story isn't really about technology. It's about a team that kept saying yes when other providers said no.

No broadband on your estate? We'll build a wireless network. Need CCTV but don't want a second provider? We'll run it on the same network. Want to know your estate's carbon footprint? We'll add sensors. Need your factory equipment talking to your business systems? We'll connect it.

Eighteen years of that approach has produced something that's hard to find: a company that actually connects systems end to end, rather than selling you a box and leaving you to work out how it fits with everything else.

If that sounds like the kind of technology partner your business or estate needs, book a conversation with us.