A List To Moving Your Office Communications
Moving
People say moving to a new home and moving to a new office is something you only want to do once…because it’s so painful you never want to do it again.
Call a moving company to move all your personal items to the new office. However, contact a communications specialist to coordinate your communications move. Here is list of items that you need to cover before moving your office phone system and data communications.
1. Voice & Data Cabling: As soon as you have access to your new office perform a site survey to make sure it has voice/data cabling where you need it. Make sure you account for wireless access point locations, printer/copier locations and overhead paging locations. You also need to decide if you will go with category 5e, category 6 cabling or fiber and if the cabling needs to be plenum rated or not.
2. Moving Your Phone Numbers: You have two options here. Contact your current carrier and have them move your phone number to the new office or port your phone number to a new carrier. If you are moving out of your local calling area, keeping your current carrier may be very expensive as they will charge you a per minute rate to send calls to the number outside of the local calling area. If this is the case, look into changing to a SIP trunk. SIP is VoIP and porting numbers outside of the local calling area is permitted and does not cost extra. If you are keeping your same carrier, give your phone company at least two weeks notice. If you are changing providers, allow at least 4-6 weeks.
3. Phone System: If you are keeping the same phone company in #2, moving your phone system is easy, but should you do it? The money you pay to move it could be better served going towards a brand new phone system with new features that could help your business. If you are changing phone service to a SIP trunk purchase a new system that can accommodate the newer SIP technology. You may even be surprised, most of the time changing to SIP can save you enough money to easily afford a new phone system.
4. INTERNET: You may have multiple options for internet service at your new location. Contact all the prospective internet vendors and have them do a site survey to see if they can provide service to your new locaiton. And if so, what speeds can they offer you and at what price?
5. Data Communications: You may need a new router after deciding on #4. Also, now may the time to upgrade to a Gigabit data switch, but only if you decided on Category 6 cabling in #1. Wireless access points are much better today than they were a few years ago, upgrade now to get better coverage and maybe offer a guest wireless network to keep visitors off of your business network. Is now the time to move to the cloud? You should at least look at that option now.
Moving is difficult, contact your local communications specialist for assistance…the earlier the better! If you follow the list above, the only thing you will have to worry about is if the moving company shows up.
Connecticut Communications 203.985.1000 www.ctcom.com
Unified Communications, phone systems, video surveillance and voice/data cabling.
