Prepping Your Network for an Office Move: What to Do 90, 60 and 30 Days Out

Most office moves go sideways for the same reason: the furniture gets scheduled months in advance and the network gets scheduled two weeks out. Movers can work a weekend. Carriers cannot. If your internet circuit is not ordered early enough, it does not matter how clean the cabling is or how nice the new conference room looks. Your people show up Monday morning and cannot work.

We install cabling and networks for businesses relocating around Chicagoland and the Midwest, and the pattern is consistent. The moves that go smoothly are the ones where somebody owned the network timeline from the start. Here is what that timeline actually looks like.

First: know what you’re actually moving

Before any of the dates below mean anything, walk your current space and write down what exists. Not what you think exists. What is physically there.

• Number of desks, and how many drops each one has today
• Printers, copiers, time clocks, badge readers, TVs, digital signage
• Wireless access points and where they’re mounted
• Cameras, NVR/recorder location, and how long you retain footage
• Phones: how many handsets, how many actual numbers, conference room and lobby phones, fax lines and alarm lines
• Server room or comm room contents: switches, firewall, UPS, patch panels, anything rack-mounted
• Your internet circuit: carrier, speed, contract end date, static IP block if you have one

That last one matters more than people expect. Circuit contracts often have term commitments and early termination fees, and the carrier serving your old building may not serve the new one at all.

90 days out: circuits, floor plans and scope

Order the internet circuit now

This is the single longest lead item in an office move and the one nobody starts early enough. A cable or fixed-wireless connection to an already-served building can be quick. Fiber to a building that has never had it can require a construction quote, a permit, a landlord agreement and physical trenching or aerial work. That is not a two-week process.

Ask the carrier two specific questions: is the building already on-net, and what is the realistic install window with construction included. Get it in writing. If the answer is vague, order a backup connection from a second provider. A cheap secondary circuit is far less expensive than a week of downtime.

Get the floor plan and mark it up

Ask the landlord or your architect for a CAD or PDF floor plan of the new suite. Mark where desks, printers, APs, cameras, TVs and the comm room will go. This drawing is what your cabling contractor prices from, and it is what keeps you from discovering on install day that the conference room has no data drop.

Confirm where the comm room is and whether it’s usable

Walk it. Check for power (dedicated circuits, not a shared receptacle), a place to mount or stand a rack, ventilation or cooling, and where the building’s demarc is. In multi-tenant buildings the demarc may be in a shared basement or riser closet, and you may need an intra-building pathway from there to your suite. That pathway is often the landlord’s to approve.

Scope the cabling

Bring in a cabling contractor for a site walk while the space is still open framing if you can. Pre-drywall is the cheapest time to run cable, by a wide margin. Get pricing on drops, backbone fiber between floors or IDFs, pathways, and testing. If you are doing a full buildout, our post on planning IT infrastructure for a new office buildout covers how this coordinates with the general contractor.

60 days out: build, order and coordinate

Cabling goes in

Rough-in happens after framing and before drywall and ceilings close. Coordinate directly with the GC — cabling has to land after electrical rough-in but before the walls close, and that window is short. Missing it means fishing cable through finished walls later at a premium.

Specify what you want tested and documented up front. Every drop should be certified with a tester, labeled at both ends, and handed to you as a report. You want the labeling scheme and as-built drawings, not just working jacks. Skipping this saves a little money now and costs a lot later. This is the core of what structured cabling work should include.

Order hardware with lead time in mind

Switches, firewalls, access points, UPS units and racks can all carry lead times. Order early enough that you can stage and configure the gear before it needs to be live. Configuring a firewall the night before a move is how mistakes happen.

Start the phone porting process

Number porting is a carrier-to-carrier process and it runs on their schedule, not yours. Start it well ahead of the move and never disconnect the old service until the port completes — canceling early orphans the number and it can be gone for good. Gather your current bills, account numbers and service address exactly as the carrier has them, because a mismatch on the address will reject the port.

Plan the cutover for servers and cameras

Decide whether equipment moves over a weekend or whether you run both sites in parallel for a few days. Parallel costs more but removes most of the risk. If you have on-prem servers or an NVR, decide what happens to recorded footage and whether the recorder travels with the cameras or gets replaced.

30 days out: verify, stage and rehearse

• Confirm the circuit install date in writing, and confirm the demarc location the carrier will deliver to. Carriers sometimes deliver to a building entrance, not your suite — you may need a fiber or copper extension from there.
• Walk the cabling with your contractor and get the test reports and labeled as-builts in hand before you sign off.
• Stage and configure network gear: switches, firewall, VLANs, wireless controller, DHCP scopes, printer IPs.
• Mount access points and cameras and verify they power up and are reachable over PoE.
• Verify the phone port date and have a fallback — temporary forwarding to cell phones costs almost nothing and saves you if the port slips.
• Update your address everywhere it matters: 911/E911 records for VoIP, alarm monitoring, ISP billing, and any service that geolocates you.
• Label and inventory everything before it goes on the truck. Photograph the back of the rack before you unplug it.

Move weekend and the first Monday

Have someone technical on site the morning people arrive. Not on call — on site. The first hour of the first day surfaces everything the checklist missed: the copier nobody scoped a drop for, the badge reader that needs a network port, the conference room TV with no HDMI extender.

Test before people arrive, not with them. Walk the space with a laptop and a phone and check every jack, every AP, every handset, every camera view. Confirm internet failover actually fails over by unplugging the primary. Confirm inbound calls ring and outbound calls show the right caller ID.

The mistakes we see most

• Ordering the circuit too late. It is always the circuit.
• Assuming the previous tenant’s cabling is fine. It’s usually unlabeled, untested, and terminated to whatever standard was convenient. Test it before you build a plan around it.
• Under-counting drops. Adding one later is disproportionately expensive compared to running it during rough-in. Two drops per desk and spares in conference rooms is cheap insurance.
• Forgetting the odd devices: time clocks, alarm panels, elevator phones, vending, HVAC controllers, break room TVs.
• No documentation. If nobody can tell which jack goes to which port, every future troubleshooting call starts from zero.
• Disconnecting phone service before the port finishes.

Who owns this

Somebody has to hold the network timeline and it should be one named person, not a committee. That person tracks the circuit order, the cabling schedule, the phone port and the hardware. If you don’t have someone internally with the bandwidth, your cabling contractor or IT provider can carry it — but make the ownership explicit either way.

If you’re planning a move in Chicagoland or the Midwest, we’re happy to do a site walk of the new space and tell you honestly what it needs. We handle the cabling, network installation, phones and cameras, and we’d rather have that conversation 90 days out than 9 days out.