Office moves take months to plan — fit-out, furniture, lease terms, removalists. Connectivity almost always gets left until the last few weeks, and that's when things go wrong. Getting your internet, phones, and infrastructure sorted early makes the move seamless. Leave it late and you risk starting at your new premises with no working phones and staff on mobile hotspots.
This checklist covers what to think about, what to action, and roughly when.
Internet — check the new site early
This is the one with the longest lead times, so it needs to go on the list first.
Not every premises can get every type of connection. Before you commit to a new address, it's worth checking what's actually serviceable there — FTTP, FTTC, HFC, or fixed fibre — and whether it can meet your requirements. A standard NBN connection might be provisioned in a week or two. An NBN Enterprise Ethernet service with a contractual SLA can take 60–90 days from order to active.
An office move is also a natural time to revisit whether your current service type still fits. If your business has grown since the last time you thought about it, the new premises might be the right moment to step up. Consider:
- How many staff will be at the new site, and what are they doing on the connection?
- Are you running VoIP phones across it? Cloud applications? Video conferencing?
- Do you need a symmetrical service — equal upload and download speeds?
- Do you need a contractual repair time SLA?
It's also worth adding a 4G or 5G backup connection from the outset. Rather than treating backup internet as something to add later, provisioning it alongside your primary service means you're protected from day one.
Phone system — the good news
If you're on a cloud-based phone system, the move is straightforward. Your phone system lives in the cloud, not in a box on the wall. Handsets plug into the network at the new site and register automatically. There's no migration, no reconfiguration, and no system downtime.
This also means you can run across both sites simultaneously during the transition. Staff at the old premises and staff at the new premises are on the same system, sharing the same extensions, hunt groups, and call queues. You move people when you're ready, not when your phone system forces you to.
A few things to action regardless:
Update the IPND. Even though your numbers don't change, your address does. The IPND — the database emergency services use to locate you when you call 000 — needs to be updated with your new address. Let us know your move date and new address and we'll take care of it.
Review your configuration. A move is a good opportunity to audit your setup. Do the hunt groups and after-hours settings still reflect how the business actually operates? Are there extensions for staff who've left? Are you using the right number of SIP channels for your call volume?
Check your handsets. If handsets are going to be physically relocated, check the condition of cables and headsets before the move — not after.
Cabling and physical infrastructure
This is the area most often overlooked until someone's standing in the new office with a laptop and nowhere to plug it in.
Don't assume the existing cabling at the new premises is adequate. Older buildings in particular may have structured cabling that's dated, poorly documented, or simply not enough for your needs. Things to check:
- Is there sufficient cabling to every workstation and meeting room?
- Are there enough ports at the patch panel for your devices?
- Is there PoE (Power over Ethernet) switch capacity for your IP handsets?
- Where is the comms cabinet, and is it suitable — ventilated, secure, large enough?
This work needs to be coordinated with your fit-out contractor early. Cabling done after walls are finished costs more and looks worse. Make sure whoever is responsible for the fit-out understands your data and voice requirements before they start.
Servers and on-premises hardware — do they need to move at all?
If your current office has a server room or comms room with physical servers, the move raises a question worth sitting with: do these servers actually need to come with you?
Physical infrastructure is expensive to relocate safely. It needs to be powered down, transported carefully, reinstalled, and re-commissioned at the other end — during which time the services it runs are unavailable. And it arrives at the new premises needing the same things it needed at the old one: reliable power, cooling, physical security, and someone to deal with it when something goes wrong at 2am.
An office move is often the clearest trigger to evaluate co-location or cloud migration. The options worth considering:
Co-location. Your physical hardware moves into a professional data centre rather than a new comms room. You get redundant power, precision cooling, physical security, and fast connectivity — without the cost and risk of running that infrastructure yourself. The hardware is still yours; it just lives somewhere better.
Cloud migration. If the workloads running on those servers are suitable candidates, migrating them to cloud infrastructure before the move means the servers don't need to go anywhere at all. The move itself becomes simpler, and you arrive at the new premises without a server room dependency.
Either way, the time to make this decision is in the planning phase — not moving week.
Suggested lead times
| When | What to action |
|---|---|
| 3+ months out | Check serviceability at new address. Get quotes for internet and any infrastructure upgrades. Assess server/co-location options. |
| 2 months out | Place internet orders. Engage cabling contractor. Confirm cloud or co-location migration plan if applicable. |
| 1 month out | Confirm internet activation dates. Notify us of your move date so we can update the IPND. Review phone system configuration. |
| 2 weeks out | Confirm overlap period is in place. Test new site connectivity before staff arrive. |
| Moving week | Relocate handsets. Confirm all services active. Decommission old site connections once no longer needed. |
One conversation covers all of it
The advantage of working with a provider who handles internet, phones, and data centre co-location is that you don't need to coordinate multiple suppliers through a move. One conversation, one point of contact, one team who understands how all the pieces connect.
If you're planning an office move — or even just starting to think about one — get in touch early. The earlier we're involved, the more options you have.