Cat6 and Phone Cabling for a Downtown Toronto Corporate Office

The head office was in the United States. Nobody from their team could be in the building day to day, so they needed a contractor in Toronto who could run the job and report back honestly on what was happening on site.

Managing a build the client cannot walk

Working for an out-of-province head office changes how you run a job. Nobody is going to walk the floor and spot that a riser is blocked or that the electrician has taken the pathway you planned to use. We handled the site meetings, the building access and the coordination with the other trades, and sent photos and progress notes so the client could see the state of the job without flying anyone in.

The part clients in that position usually care about most is being told early when something changes. A blocked pathway found in week one is a scheduling note. The same problem found in week four is a delay.

What we installed

• Over 240 Cat6 FT6 runs throughout the office. FT6 is the plenum-rated jacket required where cable runs through return-air spaces in Canadian buildings, which most downtown Toronto office floors have
• A 42U floor-standing cabinet as the main distribution point. At 240 runs you are filling most of a cabinet that size once the patch panels, switches and cable management are in, which is why the cabinet gets sized from the drop count rather than picked off a shelf
• Patch panels, terminated and labelled so the ports on the panel match the numbering at the desks
• Cable tray to carry the bundles cleanly above the ceiling instead of laying them on the grid
• Server rack installation and fit-out
• Wireless access points, each on its own home run back to the cabinet
• Removal of the previous tenant’s abandoned cable

Why the tray and the labelling matter

Two parts of that list are the ones people skip to save money, and they are the two that cost the most later. Cable laid across ceiling tiles instead of in tray sags, gets disturbed by every other trade that goes up there, and fails a certification test. Unlabelled patch panels mean every future move or add starts with someone tracing cables with a toner.

We test and document as we go, so the client ends up with a set of results and a port map rather than a working network nobody can describe.

The result

The office was cabled, tested and handed over ahead of the date the client had set, with documentation their US team could read without having seen the building.

Related services: office cabling in Toronto, Cat6 cabling, cabinet and rack installation and phone cabling.