Travel is the most expensive part of a five-minute fix
A cable that needs reseating in a hall four hundred miles away costs a flight, a hotel and a day of an engineer's time. Smart hands exists to remove that cost - and the delay - by putting a competent, cleared person in the room within the window you need.
The distinction that matters is who that person is. Most global smart-hands offerings are brokered: a request lands with a local subcontractor, and the quality of your outage depends on who was available. Ours are Cogent employees, with the induction, clearance and skill record held in Cogent OS, working to our documented standards and evidencing what they did.
We work under your runbooks or ours. Most clients start with ad-hoc tickets, then move to pre-booked blocks or a resident worker once they see how much travel and escalation time it removes.
Three levels, priced and scoped separately
Buying the right level matters. Paying advanced rates for cable reseating is waste; sending a remote-hands technician to a firmware upgrade is a failed visit. The scope below is what each level is contracted to do.
Remote Hands · L1
Physical actions under instruction, with no configuration authority. The fastest and cheapest level, and the one that resolves the majority of tickets.
Standard Smart Hands · L1.5-L2
Hands-on work to a schedule or runbook, including single-device installation and guided configuration with your team on the line.
Advanced Smart Hands · L2+
Technical work alongside your NOC, where the worker is contributing judgement rather than following steps.
How you buy it
Four models, and the honest answer about which suits which pattern of demand. Most estates end up with a mix - a retainer for the primary site, ad-hoc for the long tail.
| MODEL | HOW IT WORKS | RESPONSE | COMMERCIAL MODEL | BEST FOR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ad-hoc hourly | Raise a ticket when you need someone; we dispatch from the nearest entity | Contracted tier - typically 4H or NBD | Per-hour with a minimum call-out, plus travel where applicable | Long-tail sites and unpredictable, low-volume demand |
| Pre-booked blocks | Purchase a block of hours drawn down against tickets, with priority dispatch | Faster than ad-hoc; scheduling priority within the block | Discounted block rate, unused hours rolled per agreement | Steady monthly demand across several sites |
| Monthly retainer | A committed monthly allocation with named workers familiar with your estate | Contracted tier with guaranteed availability | Fixed monthly fee, overage at block rate | Primary data centres and business-critical halls |
| Resident worker | A dedicated Cogent worker on your site full or part time, under our employment and management | On site during agreed shift; immediate | Fixed monthly cost per FTE, shift-pattern dependent | Large halls, campuses and continuous project work |
Retainer and resident models include a named delivery manager and monthly reporting on hours consumed, task mix and response performance. Utilisation is visible in the portal so you can right-size at renewal rather than guessing.
The site types, and what each demands
Colocation & hyperscale halls
The operator sets the rules and we work inside them. Clearance is the gating factor, so we treat it as an operational asset rather than paperwork.
Enterprise server rooms
Smaller, less formal, often with no local IT presence - which makes documentation and photographic evidence more important, not less.
Edge, retail and branch comms rooms
Hundreds of small rooms with inconsistent standards. Consistency comes from the runbook, not the room.
With your NOC in the loop
The lane that matters on this diagram is yours. Smart hands works when your engineer and our worker are on the same call, looking at the same evidence.
In-app chat per job in the Field Worker Portal keeps the conversation on the work order. We do not use WhatsApp or SMS for operational communication.
The rules we work to
Two-person rule
Production-affecting work in live halls is performed by two workers where the site or the change class requires it, so a single mistake is caught before it becomes an outage.
Change control
Anything touching production runs against a change record with CAB approval, a defined window and a rollback position - ours or yours, whichever governs the estate.
Evidence standard
Every visit produces a worksheet with before-and-after photographs, serial capture and the worker's sign-off. A work order cannot close without it.
Media handling policy
Drives and tapes are handled under chain of custody, with destruction routed into our certified ITAD process and a certificate per asset where disposal applies.
What retainer clients see monthly
A delivered programme
One of the world's largest steel and industrial engineering groups needed SD-WAN edge devices deployed across roughly 902 plants and offices - live industrial environments where site access is governed by strict health and safety regimes.
Our workers deployed to a next-business-day SLA, arriving on the scheduled date with the materials needed - not a single visit was rescheduled. In Europe we coordinated directly with each plant's health-and-safety management companies, completing the inductions and compliance steps that most providers cannot execute consistently across the continent. Every clearance and induction was tracked in Cogent OS before dispatch.
The programme attained 99% against SLA. The differentiator was not the device - it was disciplined access, compliance and scheduling at industrial scale, delivered by directly-employed workers.
Anonymised by agreement. Client names available under NDA.
Questions buyers ask
Can your workers follow our runbooks?
Yes, and it is the normal arrangement for retainer clients. We load your runbooks into Cogent OS against the site, so the worker sees the correct procedure on the job rather than being briefed verbally. Where you have no runbook we will write one from the first few visits and hand it to you as a deliverable.
What happens when a task exceeds the contracted level?
The worker stops and escalates rather than improvising. Depending on the arrangement that means a live call with your NOC, an escalation to one of our engineering practices, or a re-scope to advanced smart hands with your approval. The escalation and who authorised it are recorded on the work order, so there is no ambiguity about scope creep.
What tooling do your workers carry?
Standard kit includes console cables and adapters, cable testers, labelling equipment, torque and hand tools, ESD protection, torches and a camera-capable device for evidence. Site-specific or specialist tooling - fibre kit, spectrum analysers, thermal cameras - is issued from the nearest hub for the job that needs it.
Do you cover nights, weekends and public holidays?
Yes where contracted. Out-of-hours cover is priced explicitly by window rather than averaged into a day rate, and retainer clients can define which sites carry 24/7 cover and which are business-hours only. Public holidays differ by country, and the entitlement database records which calendar applies to each site.
Can we have a dedicated worker on site?
Yes - a resident model, full or part time, under our employment and management with a named delivery manager. The worker learns your estate, follows your change process and appears in your portal like any other Cogent resource, but the employment, cover for absence and training obligation remain ours.
Other field service lines
Stop sending engineers to reseat cables.
Tell us the sites and the levels you need. We will show you which workers are cleared, what response is realistic and which engagement model fits your demand.