Most of an office move goes roughly to plan. The desks arrive, the sign goes up, somebody eventually finds the coffee maker. The part that catches people out is the network, because almost everything in the new space depends on it and almost none of it can be done on moving day.
We get a version of the same call every few months. The lease starts Monday, the phones are dead, and the internet order was never placed. So here is what we tell people to sort out first, in the order that actually matters, and what it tends to cost.
Order the internet before anything else
This is the longest lead time in the move and the one piece nobody can speed up. A connection into a building that already has business service can be turned up quickly. A new build, a unit that has never had a circuit, or anything that needs a crew on a pole or in a trench can run weeks instead of days.
Two questions to ask the provider: does the address already have facilities, and what is the committed install date in writing. A range is not a date.
While you wait, decide what happens if that circuit is late or drops after you open. A cellular failover gateway will carry a small office through an outage on the same network gear, which we covered in our write-up on 5G backup internet.
Walk the new space with a floor plan in hand
Cabling is cheap before the furniture and expensive after it. Walk the unit and count everything that needs a wired connection: desks, printers, the point-of-sale counter, wall-mounted displays, access points, cameras, door readers, the alarm panel. Add a spare drop anywhere you think the layout might change, because it will.
Installed Cat6 drops start at $195 each, Cat6A from $245, and both get noticeably cheaper per drop when the ceiling tiles are already out and we are not working around staff. Keep in mind that an Ethernet run tops out at 100 metres including patch cords, so where the rack goes decides what is reachable from it.
For Wi-Fi, we plan coverage from an imported floor plan in UniFi Design Center before anything gets bought, which gives us access point placement and channel planning on paper rather than guesswork on site. We wrote about that tool when the new version landed. Awkward spaces still deserve a real measurement: concrete demising walls, steel racking, long narrow industrial bays. A Wi-Fi survey and heat map starts at $395 and usually pays for itself by stopping you buying two access points you did not need.
Your phone number may not come with you
This surprises people more than anything else on the list. Canadian local numbers port within their existing exchange, not across the province. The CRTC has approved a wider porting zone in Metro Vancouver, and that approval was specifically not extended to exchange boundaries elsewhere. In practice, a landline number from a Simcoe or Delhi exchange will not simply follow you to Hamilton or Oakville.
A number already sitting on a hosted voice platform is a different story, because it is not tied to the building at all. That is the real argument for moving the phones off copper before the move rather than during it. Our managed voice lines run $24.95 a month, or $14.95 on a Care plan, with a number port at $49 and phone system setup at $499 ($299 on Care). Start the port well ahead of the move date, not the week of, because the losing carrier sets the pace and they are not in a hurry.
If you are still weighing the options, our guide to small business phone systems in Ontario covers the trade-offs, and the business phone and VoIP page has the current plans.
Decide what the rack looks like before it exists
A new space is the one chance you get to do the closet properly: a patch panel, labelled drops that match a floor plan, a shelf that is actually rated for the gear, a UPS, and somewhere for the heat to go. Ten minutes of labelling now saves an hour of tracing later, every time.
If you are inheriting somebody else's cabling, get it looked at before you trust it. A network audit is $495 and tells you what is live, what is mislabelled, and what has to be replaced. Our network closet checklist is a reasonable self-assessment if you want to look first, and we also do straight rack cleanups on existing rooms.
Cameras and door hardware get installed last, planned first
The drops for cameras and card readers have to go in while the walls and ceilings are open, even if the hardware itself gets mounted weeks later. Think about where the entrances are, where deliveries land, where cash or stock sits, and who needs a credential rather than a key. Running that cable later means lifting tiles and patching drywall in a working office.
Both camera installs and access control are far less disruptive when the cable is already waiting for them.
What a move like this costs
Technician labour is $135 an hour in our Norfolk home zone and $150 an hour on the Hamilton, Burlington and Oakville side. Outside the home zone there is a visit minimum that the day's work counts toward: $395 for sites 31 to 60 minutes out, $595 for 60 minutes and beyond. Close to home there is no minimum.
Hardware, drops and labour all get quoted in writing before any work starts, and for a move we price the cabling and the gear as separate lines so you can stage the spend across the move.
The short version: order the internet, get the cable in before the furniture, and deal with the phone number early. Everything else is schedulable.
If you have a move coming up in Norfolk, Oxford, Brant, Haldimand, or over toward Hamilton and Oakville, get in touch with a floor plan and a date and we will work backwards from it. You can also read more about what we cover on the office network setup page.
Sources
- Telecom Decision CRTC 2016-345
- Local Number Portability roll-out notification for Ontario, CRTC
- UniFi Talk number porting, Ubiquiti Help Center
- Meet the New UniFi Design Center, Ubiquiti
Cabling, networks, cameras, access control, smart homes, hosting and software for homes and small business across Southwestern Ontario. Twenty-plus years in the trade, and we still answer the phone.