Office moves fail on technology more often than on anything else, and they fail in a specific and avoidable way: the timeline for two items is much longer than anyone expects, and both of them tend to get started last.
Here is the sequence that works, counting backward from the day your staff need to sit down and work.
Before you sign the lease
Two decisions get locked in at lease signing that are expensive to change afterward.
Which carriers actually serve the building. Not which carriers advertise in the area. Which ones have fiber into that specific address already. If the answer is none, someone has to build it, and that can mean permits, street work and a timeline measured in months rather than weeks. Ask the landlord for the building’s existing carrier list and verify it directly with the carriers, because building management is frequently working from stale information.
Where the telecom room goes. Copper cabling has a 90 meter limit from patch panel to wall outlet, including the vertical runs and slack. On a large or oddly shaped floor, a telecom room in the wrong corner means either a second room or fiber runs to intermediate closets, both of which cost real money. This is trivially cheap to get right during space planning and expensive to fix after.
If you can, have your technology provider look at the floor plan before you sign. It is an hour of work that regularly saves five figures.
90 days out: order the circuits
This is the item that delays move in dates more than any other.
Order your primary internet circuit as soon as the lease is executed. Fiber commonly takes 60 to 90 days from order to turn up, and that clock does not start until the order is placed and the site survey is done. If the building needs construction to reach it, add more.
Order a secondary circuit at the same time, ideally from a different provider on a different physical path. For most businesses now, internet is not a utility that can be down for a day. If your primary is fiber, a cable or fixed wireless backup is inexpensive insurance.
Also at this stage: if you are still on traditional phone lines, start planning the move to cloud VoIP. A cloud system removes the phone circuit from your critical path entirely, because the phones just need internet.
60 days out: design the low voltage
Now the physical layer gets planned in detail. Where the drops go, how many per workstation, where the wireless access points sit, where cameras and card readers are needed.
This has to be designed before construction gets far, because structured cabling goes in while ceilings are open and before furniture arrives. Coordinating it with your general contractor and electrician is far cheaper than coming back afterward.
A few things worth deciding deliberately rather than by default:
- Two drops per desk minimum, even in a laptop heavy office. Docks, printers, desk phones and the thing nobody anticipated all want a port, and adding one later costs many times what it costs now.
- Cat6A to wireless access points and uplinks. The cable is a small part of the job cost; the labor to pull it again is not.
- Access point placement planned, not defaulted. Mounting them in hallways because it is easy produces the coverage problems everyone then blames on the vendor.
- Conference room requirements settled early, because AV needs power and data in specific places and the ceiling has to accommodate microphones and displays.
30 days out: build the network
Cabling gets installed, tested and certified. Racks go in. Switches, firewall and wireless get configured, ideally staged and tested off site so they arrive ready.
This is also the window for anything that needs to be ordered: hardware lead times are better than they were during the shortage years but are not zero, and discovering a six week lead time on a switch three weeks before the move is a bad afternoon.
Get access control hardware installed while the doors are accessible and the walls are open.
14 days out: verify
The new circuit should be live and tested well before anyone depends on it. Do not accept a carrier’s word that it is turned up. Run actual throughput tests, confirm the static addresses are what was ordered, and verify failover works by unplugging the primary.
Cabling certification reports should be in hand. Wireless should be surveyed in the real space, with furniture in place if possible, because drywall and people attenuate signal in ways an empty floor does not show.
Move weekend
The physical move of servers and workstations is the easy part if everything above is done. Plan it as a sequence with a rollback point: nothing at the old site gets disconnected until the equivalent at the new site is confirmed working.
Keep the old circuit live for two to four weeks after the move. It costs one more month of service and it is the cheapest insurance in the entire project.
Week one at the new site
Have someone on site. There will be a list, and it is always small things: a port that was not patched, a printer that did not get its new address, a conference room where the display comes on but the camera does not. Being there means those get closed in an hour rather than accumulating into a bad first impression of the new office.
The pattern worth noticing
Almost everything that goes wrong in an office move is a sequencing problem rather than a technical one. The cable could not be pulled because the ceiling was closed. The circuit was not ready because it was ordered after the lease was signed rather than at signing. The conference room needed a power drop that nobody told the electrician about.
Running the technology scope through one provider who handles the cabling, the network, the phones and the AV removes most of those handoffs, because the person coordinating with your general contractor is the same person who has to make it all work on day one.
If you are looking at a lease and a move date, we are happy to walk the space and build the technology timeline against your construction schedule. That conversation is free and it is considerably more useful ninety days out than thirty.