Structured Cabling for a New Downtown Toronto Office Fit-Out

A technology company outgrew its space and leased a new floor downtown. The building’s existing cabling was old enough to be useless to them, and they had a move-in date that was not going to move.

Deciding what to keep

The first question on any fit-out is whether the cable already in the ceiling is worth anything. Here it was not. The existing runs were an older category, undocumented, and there was no way to certify what was up there without testing every run, which costs more than pulling new cable.

We told them that early. Paying to test cable you are probably going to replace is the most common way money gets wasted on a fit-out.

Designing around how they actually work

An open-plan floor and a floor of private offices are two different cabling problems. Open desks move. Private offices do not, but they need their own runs and they block the pathways you would otherwise use. We walked the architect’s layout and planned it as two zones:

• Open-plan areas got a higher drop count per desk cluster than the current headcount needed, because adding drops later in an occupied office costs several times what it costs during a fit-out
• Private offices and meeting rooms got their own runs, including the connections for displays and room booking panels
• Cat6A to the desk, so the floor supports multi-gigabit to the workstation and PoE for access points and cameras without a rerun
• Fiber for the backbone between the comms room and the floor equipment
• Patch panels, tray and a labelling scheme agreed with their IT lead before anything was terminated

Working to a fixed move-in date

The cabling has to be finished before the ceiling closes, which means the cabling schedule is set by the general contractor’s schedule, not by ours. We sequenced the pulls to follow the drywall and ceiling crews floor by floor, and did terminations and testing in the evenings once the other trades had cleared out, so no one was working over anyone else.

Testing and handover

Every run was tested and certified, and the client received the results along with a floor plan showing outlet locations, a port map linking each outlet to its patch panel position, and the labelling scheme. That is the part that makes the next change cheap, and it is what an incoming IT manager will ask for first.

The result

The office was ready on the move-in date and inside the budget they had set. The floor was built with more capacity than they needed on day one, which is the point: the second time they add people, nobody is back in the ceiling.

Related: office cabling in Toronto, Cat6A installation, data cabling for new installations and our step-by-step new office cabling plan.