Barrer Technology

Meet Steven Barrer of Barrer Technology in North Bay

When you call Barrer Technology & Communication Solutions (BTCS), you get Steven Barrer, the technician who designs and installs the work himself. He started the business in 2022, and BTCS has been operating for roughly five years.

Steve was the kid who took apart computers, TVs and printers to see what was inside, then tried to put them back together and make them work. Most of the time it worked out. These days the cool stuff is in ceilings and network rooms.

One North Bay business summed up the team as fast, timely, professional and well spoken, with the workspace kept clean and organized the whole way through.

A Veteran and Indigenous Owned Network Company in North Bay

Steve served just under twelve years in the Canadian Armed Forces. His day job was finance, managing multi million dollar budgets, cash forecasting and auditing, but it is always soldier first, so basic training and the range came with it. What carried over is precision, discipline, repeatable processes, and showing up when you say you are going to.

In the last year, Tori Barrer took over majority ownership of the company as its Owner and Director of Operations, and Steve will happily tell you he works for her now. Tori is a proud Indigenous business owner, a veteran with over a decade in the Canadian Armed Forces, and a mother, and she builds the business around considering the next seven generations. She runs the growth, the finances, the administration, the client relationships and the ordering. Steve does the technical side of the job, which is what he is good at. He gets more done, he is happier, and so are the clients.

Why Barrer Technology Moved to Commercial Network Cabling

Like most new companies, BTCS started in homes, with Starlink, cameras and smart home systems. Steve noticed quickly that the return was not there. It was high effort, low margin work, so he made the hard decision to double down on commercial, industrial and institutional clients instead. That is the whole business today, and the company no longer takes residential Starlink installs.

Breaking in takes time. In a town like North Bay it is usually who you know, and plenty of businesses have had the same guy for twenty years. In the past year Steve's jobs have included work for Dollarama, Tim Hortons, Walmart and Home Hardware.

Network Technician or Electrician? What to Know Before You Hire

Network cabling often gets lumped in with the electrical, because to most people, wire is wire. An electrician designs, installs and maintains an electrical system. A network technician does the same for a data system, with different standards and different codes. Steve is working toward his Network Cabling Specialist trade designation through Skilled Trades Ontario, a separate trade with its own journeyman level.

His advice before you hire anyone to wire your building or put in cameras starts there. Network cabling is not a mandatory trade, so anybody can pull wire out of their trunk and run it through a ceiling. Make sure your installer is certified or experienced, and can back it up.

Then look at your return. Check whether the equipment carries a recurring monthly subscription, and if it does, understand the terms. And know the quality of the product going into your building. Just because it is cable does not mean it will still perform in five or ten years. That goes for fibre and category cabling alike, and BTCS often gets called in to replace subpar cable soon after somebody else put it in. One more tip: if anyone sells you Cat 7, ask questions. Steve calls it an exotic cable. You can buy it online, but that does not make it Cat 7.

Designed, Tested, Certified and Documented

Steve is not just running cables through a ceiling to get point A talking to point B. The team designs the system, installs it, tests it, certifies it, and hands you the documentation at the end, so you know it will be reliable for years. Many of his industrial customers have a zero downtime mandate, where every hour the network is down is lost revenue.

His latest job shows why. At two solar sites, the fibre linking the sites to the hydro controls had failed. The original contractor laid it ten years ago in corrugated pipe, and as the ground shifted, something snapped the glass core. The sites were losing thousands of dollars a day. BTCS ran a temporary line across the field to get them back online, then installed 650 feet of underground PVC conduit and pulled, spliced and tested an armoured outside plant OM3 multimode fibre optic line. The conduit protects the cable and leaves a pathway for a second one.

Point to Point Wireless in North Bay and Cottage Country

Point to point wireless is not WiFi. It is a dedicated radio link between two buildings, what Steve calls an Ethernet cable without the Ethernet cable.

One customer was about to dig up his driveway, for thousands of dollars, to bring Starlink from his garage into a house shaded by trees. A point to point link did it instead. Another owned a house on a lake and two rental cottages about two kilometres across the water, and planned to buy two more Starlinks. Steve linked the cottages to the house over the lake and saved them about three hundred dollars a month. Some of his radios reach thirty kilometres with line of sight.

What Customers Say About Steve and Barrer Technology

Thirty Google reviews, all five stars, and the same words keep coming up: knowledgeable, professional, prompt, patient. What Steve wants one business owner to tell another is simple. This guy knew what he was doing. He showed up when he said he would, did an amazing job, and handed over the documentation to prove it.

He still remembers the early home jobs, like the woman still on dial up near the end of COVID, driving to a coffee shop to do her work. After her Starlink went in, she asked Steve to help her sign up for this Netflix thing she had heard about.

Network Cabling and Fibre for North Bay and Northern Ontario

BTCS installs structured and commercial network cabling, fibre optic cabling and fibre repair, point to point wireless, wired and wireless business networks, and commercial security cameras, and offers network design and consulting. The website says a radius of 100 miles or more, and in practice the work reaches Timmins, Espanola, most of Northern Ontario and some of Quebec, whenever the job makes sense for both sides. For bigger jobs, Steve brings in trusted technicians on contract.

He stayed in his hometown on purpose. His Forces postings took him to North Bay, Borden, Ottawa and Quebec City, and he could have tried this in Toronto, where dozens of companies already do it. The North is underserved, and North Bay is where his support network is. He and Tori have three young kids, and grandma and grandpa are here. Their son is in judo, their daughter dances and is starting hockey, and the youngest just turned two. Summer weekends are spent at the family camping trailer.

What to Expect When You Call Barrer Technology

A lot of calls start with an idea. A business says, we are thinking about this, and Steve gives his best recommendation on how to move forward. Sometimes they thank him and go another route, and that is fine with him. He is not trying to be a gatekeeper or squeeze money out of anyone. If you have a real need, he is happy to share what he knows.

The office is open Monday to Thursday, 9 am to 5 pm, and Friday until 1 pm. Call the local number, (705) 497 9889, or call or text (705) 413 3594. Both reach Steve.