The lease is signed, the furniture is on the calendar, and somebody asks a reasonable question in a Tuesday meeting: when does the internet get turned on at the new place? Everybody looks at everybody. The office manager thought that was handled. You call the provider, give them the new address, and learn the suite has no fiber into it, the build requires a permit, and the earliest install date is comfortably past your move date.
That is the most common way an office move goes sideways, and it is almost entirely preventable. Everything else on moving weekend, the desks and phones and printers and badge readers, can be muscled through with enough hustle. A circuit that does not physically exist cannot be hustled. Here is the masterlist, in the order the work actually has to happen.
Order the Circuits Before Almost Anything Else
The day you have a signed lease, or honestly the day you have a serious letter of intent, request a serviceability check for the exact suite. That is the provider telling you whether they can deliver service to that address and what it would take. Give them the suite number, not just the street, because a building can be fully wired on the second floor and dark on the third.
You get one of two very different answers. Either the building is already lit, meaning fiber is there and someone runs it to your suite, or construction is required, meaning trenching, permits, and a timeline nobody can promise. Those answers are separated by an enormous amount of calendar.
- Ask where the demarcation point is. The demarc is where the provider’s responsibility ends and yours begins, usually a building telecom closet. Everything from there to your rack is your cost. Ask whether construction is required and who pays for it, in writing.
- Get a written order confirmation with a due date. Also ask what the landlord has to sign, because many providers need a building access agreement first, and that can sit in a property manager’s inbox for weeks.
- Order a second circuit from a different provider. Ideally a different physical path into the building. Two circuits from resellers riding the same fiber is one circuit in a disguise.
If the second circuit will not land in time, Starlink makes a good failover here, because satellite skips local infrastructure entirely. It does not care whether the fiber build finished. Pair it with a battery backup, called a UPS or uninterruptible power supply, so a flicker in a new building does not take the dish and your firewall down together.
The Walkthrough That Saves You Six Weeks
Walk the empty suite with your IT person and electrician before furniture arrives and before anybody closes a wall. An hour here prevents the worst kind of surprise, the kind whose fix requires a contractor who cannot come until Thursday.
- Find the telecom room and photograph it. Where the circuit lands, whether there is a rack, whether the door locks, and whether it currently stores somebody’s holiday decorations.
- Count and test the network drops. A drop is the cable run from the telecom room to a wall jack, and cabling left by a previous tenant is a coin flip. Test every one, check power at the rack location, and note where concrete, metal studs, or warehouse racking will fight your wireless.
- Photograph the old office before you touch anything. Every cable, port, label, and screen showing settings. Cheapest documentation you will ever produce, and it will save somebody at 9pm on Saturday.
The Two Weeks Before the Truck
- Start the phone number port early. The Federal Communications Commission says its rules require simple ports to be processed in one business day, but it also warns explicitly against terminating service with your existing company before starting service with the new one. Business phone moves are rarely simple ports. Start early and keep the old service alive.
- Update the 911 address on your phone system. FCC rules require 911 calls to carry a dispatchable location, which the Commission describes as the caller’s street address plus detail like room or floor number. If your system is still registered to the old building, that is where help goes. Fix it during the cutover, not after.
- Change the address everywhere it lives. Google Business Profile, invoices, bank, insurance, domain registrar, payment processor, alarm company, the state. Make an actual list, because you will forget three of them.
- Take a full backup and test a restore. Not “backups ran successfully.” Actually restore a file and open it. Moving is when hardware dies, and it is the worst possible moment to learn your backup has been failing quietly since spring.
- Decide what does not make the trip. A move is the best chance you get to retire dead equipment, and anything with a drive needs its data destroyed, not just deleted. We run a Pure Leverage DCV71 crusher at roughly nine drives a minute, meeting recognized destruction standards, which beats stacking old machines in the new closet. Label both ends of every cable while you are at it.
The Cutover Order
Sequence matters more than speed. Do these in order and moving weekend gets boring, which is the goal.
- New circuit installed and proven, well before the move. Not just a green light on the provider’s box. Push real traffic and confirm the speed and static addresses you were promised.
- Firewall and network gear staged at the new site. Configured, powered, and tested there while the old office still runs normally.
- Wireless up and walked. Somebody physically walks the whole suite with a laptop and a phone before anyone depends on it. Move printers and spare gear now, as practice on things nobody needs Monday.
- Servers and on-premises systems next, then workstations. Servers are the last thing out of the old building and the first thing racked in the new one. Moving computers into a building with no working network just relocates the problem.
- Phones last, and keep the old circuit alive. Leave the old internet service running a couple weeks past the move. The overlap cost is trivial compared to the alternative.
The Weekend Itself
Friday afternoon: final backup, verified. Shut things down in a deliberate order and write that order down. Send one email to the whole team saying what to expect Monday and who to call.
Saturday: physical move and rack. Bring things up from the outside in: internet, then firewall, then switches, then servers, then everything else. If something fails, you want to troubleshoot one layer at a time rather than stare at forty dark things.
Sunday: real testing with real people. Have two or three staff come in and do their jobs for an hour. Print something. Scan to email. Open the accounting system. Make and receive a call. Sunday is when you want to find the broken thing, not Monday at 8:05 with a lobby full of people.
What Breaks Monday Morning
Cloud services mostly do not care where you sit. The cloud is just someone else’s computer, and that computer did not move. What does care is anything with your old network baked into it: scan-to-email on the copier, credit card terminals, the alarm and badge system, vendor portals that only allow logins from your old public address, remote access, and any device somebody configured by hand years ago and never documented.
Walk that list before the move and note who to call for each. Half are a ten minute fix if you know who owns them and a lost morning if you do not. Name one person with authority to make decisions that weekend and give everyone their cell number.
Bottom line: an office move is a scheduling problem wearing a technology costume. The circuit order is the long pole and everything else fits around it, so make that call first and build the plan backward from the install date you can actually get. Do that and moving weekend is tedious instead of catastrophic.
If you have a move coming up in Lewisville, Flower Mound, Frisco, or anywhere else around Denton County and would rather not learn the fiber situation three weeks before the truck, get in touch with Harrison Ward Technology. We will make the serviceability calls, run the walkthrough, and build the cutover plan with you.
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