Start the low-voltage side of an office move four to six months out, and start it by ordering the internet circuit — not by planning the cable. A dedicated fiber circuit commonly runs 60 to 120 days to deliver, and longer if the carrier has to build to the building. Cable pull, termination, and certification are a matter of weeks; the circuit and the landlord’s paperwork are what actually decide your move date.
Nobody’s business goes dark on move-in day because the cable wasn’t pretty. It goes dark because the circuit wasn’t live, the ceiling turned out to be a return-air plenum, or the phone port slipped a week. Here’s the sequence that keeps an Orlando move boring — what to order when, what the landlord controls, and the three deadlines that don’t move for anyone.
- The long pole: your internet circuit
- The timeline, working backward from move day
- What your lease says about the cable (both ends)
- The ceiling question that stops occupancy
- How many drops you actually need
- Florida licensing and Orlando permits
- Porting numbers — and the 911 record nobody updates
- Key takeaways
- FAQs
The long pole is your internet circuit, not your cable
This is the single most common planning error, and it’s an expensive one. Business owners sequence a move as: sign the lease, design the space, run the cable, call the internet provider. By the time the last step happens, there are six weeks left and the carrier needs twelve.
Published lead times for dedicated internet access (DIA) sit at roughly 20 to 30 days in the best case and 60 to 120 days on average, even when the carrier is already on-net in the building — and off-net delivery is described in the same industry guidance as “quite unpredictable” in that 60–120 day band. Shared cable or broadband on an existing on-net building is faster, commonly two to four weeks. If the carrier has to trench or build fiber to the address, add another month or more.
There’s a hidden dependency inside that timeline that isn’t the carrier’s fault and isn’t yours either: if the provider needs to build into the building, they need a right-of-entry or building entrance agreement signed by the property owner before they can start. That signature sits on a landlord’s desk, not in a provisioning queue, and it is one of the most common silent delays in the whole process.
Order the circuit before you finalize the cabling design. The drop count can change in week eight without hurting anyone. The circuit date can’t. If you take one thing from this page, take that.
The timeline, working backward from move day
Here’s how a well-run Orlando office move actually sequences. Dates are working backward from the day your team sits down in the new space.
| When | What happens | Who owns it |
|---|---|---|
| T−6 to T−4 months | Order the internet circuit(s). Get the landlord’s entrance agreement moving in parallel. | You + carrier + landlord |
| T−4 months | Have the lease’s low-voltage language read: who removes cable at term end, work hours, vendor approval, insurance requirements. | You + attorney |
| T−90 days | Site walk. Ceiling type, existing cable and its category, telecom room location, conduit and pathway, run distances. | Low-voltage contractor |
| T−80 days | Lock the drop count with IT: workstations, access points, cameras, access control, phones, AV. | You + IT + contractor |
| T−75 days | Written scope out to bid — cable category, drop locations, and the testing standard in writing. | You |
| T−70 days | Landlord sign-offs: approved vendor, certificate of insurance, permitted work hours, permits. | Landlord |
| T−60 days | Cable pull begins, with buffer for pathway obstacles and access delays. | Contractor |
| T−45 days | Rough-in walk before the ceiling closes. Verify locations, support, and separation from power. | You + contractor |
| T−30 days | Certification testing on every run, with reports. | Contractor |
| T−25 days | Telecom room finished: labeled patch panels, cable management, as-builts. | Contractor |
| T−14 days | Circuit activated and proven. Network gear installed and configured. | Carrier + IT |
| T−7 days | Endpoints: phones, cameras, access control, AV. | IT + contractor |
| T−5 to T−1 days | Number port window (see below — this is rarely a one-day job). | Carrier |
| Move weekend | Cutover in order: circuit → firewall → switches → Wi-Fi and phones → servers → workstations. | Everyone |
Two notes from doing this a lot. First, “circuit activated” and “circuit proven” are different events — put real traffic on it two weeks early and watch it. Second, keep the old space’s service running through the overlap. Paying two bills for a month is cheaper than one dark Monday.
What your lease says about the cable — at both ends
This surprises people twice: once when they leave, once when they arrive.
Leaving: a great many commercial leases require the tenant to remove low-voltage wiring at the end of the term, or pay the landlord to do it. And code agrees independently of your lease — abandoned cable is defined as installed cable that isn’t terminated at equipment and isn’t identified for future use with a tag, and the accessible portion of it generally isn’t permitted to remain. There’s a cheap mitigation buried in that definition: a tag identifying cable for future use takes it out of “abandoned” status. Ask your contractor to tag rather than rip, where the next tenant can use it.
Arriving: assume the previous tenant did the minimum. Cut runs at the patch panel, orphaned access points still screwed to the ceiling, and a telecom room with no documentation are the normal condition of second-generation space, not the exception. That matters more in Orlando right now than it did a few years ago — CBRE’s Q1 2026 figures show office vacancy improving to 16.9% with positive net absorption, on almost no new construction. Tenants are moving into existing space, which means inheriting somebody else’s cabling decisions.
The boundary that decides who pays: the demarcation point — where the carrier’s facilities meet the building’s wiring — is the legal line. Everything inside it is generally the tenant’s problem. Where the lease is silent, that usually reads in the landlord’s favor. Get it in writing before you sign, not after you move.
The ceiling question that can stop your occupancy
If the space above your ceiling is used to move return air, it’s an environmental air space, and cable running through it has to be plenum-rated. The rule people trip on: if any part of a run passes through that space, the whole run has to be plenum. You can’t splice ratings halfway.
Two practical wrinkles. A drop ceiling is not automatically a plenum — if the return air is fully ducted, plenum cable often isn’t required. But inspectors tend to treat open ceiling cavities as plenum because ducts so frequently vent into them, and an inspector who finds non-plenum cable in a plenum can hold up your certificate of occupancy. That’s not a fine, that’s a delayed move.
The other wrinkle is money: plenum-rated cable typically runs 50% to 70% more per foot than riser-rated. On a 120-drop job that’s a real number, and it’s a number you want in the bid on day one rather than as a change order in week six.
Ask this at the site walk, in these words: “Is the ceiling cavity used as a return-air plenum, and can you show me?” If your contractor doesn’t ask it before quoting, that’s diagnostic. The answer changes the material cost, the cable ties they’re allowed to use, and whether the job passes inspection.
How many drops you actually need
The honest rule: the cable is cheap and the labor is not, so the drop you don’t run today costs several times more to add later through a finished wall. Industry practice under TIA-568 is a minimum of two outlets per work area, and working networks people consistently land on the same numbers:
- 2 drops per desk is the practical floor; 4 per private office is common and rarely regretted.
- 8–16 drops per 1,000 sq ft is a normal density for Class A office space.
- Every wireless access point needs its own home run — often two, for multi-gig uplink and redundancy. “Going wireless” does not mean “not cabling.”
- Conference rooms eat more than you think: 6–8 for a small room, 10–16 for a large one, once you count display, codec, table boxes, and the AP.
- Add cameras, access control, and any PoE lighting or door hardware to the count before you bid, not after.
Two constraints shape where the telecom room goes. The 90-meter permanent link and 100-meter total channel limit (patch cords at both ends included) sets the geometry — if the far corner is past 90 meters of actual cable path, you need a second IDF, and it’s much cheaper to know that at design than at pull. And the room itself should be interior: no exterior walls, no wet walls, nothing plumbed above it.
On budget, published 2026 ranges for installed commercial drops run roughly $125–$400 for Cat6 and $175–$500 for Cat6A, with labor at 60–70% of the invoice. Small jobs price worst per drop because mobilization is fixed — a 12-drop job carries the same truck roll as a 120-drop job. If you’re weighing cable grades, we broke that decision down in Cat6 vs Cat6A for an Orlando office, and the full line-item picture is in what structured cabling actually costs for an Orlando buildout.
Florida licensing and Orlando permits — the part people assume doesn’t apply
It applies. Florida’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation is direct about it: if you are installing wiring within a structure — and their own list of examples includes computer networks — a license is required. The relevant class is the Limited Energy Systems Specialty license, whose defined scope covers electrical wiring, raceway, conduit, and fiber optics not exceeding 98 volts.
One distinction worth knowing when you compare bids: a certified contractor can work statewide; a registered contractor is limited to the county or municipality that licensed them. You can verify any license yourself at DBPR’s public lookup before you sign anything.
On permits, the Florida Building Commission has addressed this directly — a permit is required for work related to low-voltage electrical systems including telephone, data transmission, and closed-circuit and cable television. The City of Orlando’s electrical permit application carries an explicit Low Voltage service type, and Orange County’s does the same, asking you to specify phones, televisions, speakers, security or thermostats. One local threshold to have on your radar: in the City of Orlando, if the job’s estimated cost exceeds $5,000 and isn’t tied to a building permit, a recorded Notice of Commencement has to be on file before the first inspection can be scheduled.
The carve-out that confuses everyone: Florida law exempts employees and contractors of certificated telecom and cable carriers from local low-voltage permitting. That’s a narrow exemption for the carrier bringing service to your demarc — it does not cover the contractor cabling your suite. If a bidder tells you their work doesn’t need a permit because “it’s just low voltage,” ask which statute they mean.
Porting numbers — and the 911 record nobody updates
Two deadlines here, and both get discovered late.
The port. The FCC’s rule requires carriers to complete a simple port request within one business day, and a non-simple port within four. The catch is the definition: a simple port is essentially a single line with no complex switch translations. A thirty-line office with a hunt group and a main-number rollover is not a simple port. Carrier guidance in practice treats runs of 2–19 numbers as a multi-day interval and 20 or more numbers as a “project port” with a negotiated date — which means it goes on somebody’s calendar weeks in advance, not on your move weekend by request.
The 911 record. This is the one that gets missed entirely. Under Kari’s Law and the RAY BAUM’S Act, multi-line phone systems have to support direct 911 dialing without a prefix, notify someone on site when 911 is dialed, and deliver a dispatchable location — a street address plus the room or floor detail. When you move, those location records point at your old building until somebody re-maps them. Your phones will ring perfectly on day one and still send paramedics to the wrong address. Put “re-map E911 dispatchable location” on the move checklist as its own line item with a name next to it.
Key takeaways
- Order the circuit first. Dedicated fiber commonly takes 60–120 days even on-net; the cable itself takes weeks.
- Read the lease at both ends — many require you to remove low-voltage cable when you leave, and code backs that up unless the cable is tagged for future use.
- Find out whether the ceiling is a return-air plenum before anyone quotes. It changes materials, cost, and whether you pass inspection.
- Two drops per desk minimum, every AP gets its own home run, and remember the 90 m permanent-link limit when siting the telecom room.
- Florida requires a licensed contractor for in-building network cabling, and Orlando/Orange County both permit low-voltage work.
- Anything over ~20 numbers is a project port with a negotiated date — and your E911 dispatchable location has to be re-mapped to the new suite.
Frequently asked questions
How far ahead should I start planning the cabling for an office move?
Four to six months, and the clock starts with the internet circuit rather than the cable. Dedicated fiber commonly takes 60 to 120 days to deliver even when the carrier is already in the building, and longer if they have to build to the address. The physical cabling — pull, terminate, test, certify — is typically a few weeks of work once the space is ready.
Do I have to remove the network cable when I leave my old office?
Check the lease first — many commercial leases require the tenant to remove low-voltage wiring at the end of the term or pay the landlord’s removal cost. Separately, electrical code treats untagged, unterminated cable as abandoned and generally requires the accessible portion to be removed. Cable that’s tagged as identified for future use isn’t “abandoned,” which is often the cheaper outcome for everyone.
Can I reuse the cabling that’s already in the new space?
Only if it certifies to the category you need. Legacy runs from an unknown installer can’t carry a manufacturer warranty and can’t be proven to support PoE or multi-gig speeds. Have the existing runs tested before you plan around them — a certification pass is cheap next to discovering on move weekend that half the drops are dead.
Do I need plenum-rated cable in my Orlando office?
If the ceiling cavity is used to move return air, yes — and if any part of a run crosses that space, the entire run has to be plenum-rated. A fully ducted return often doesn’t require it, but inspectors commonly treat open ceiling cavities as plenum. Plenum cable typically costs 50–70% more per foot, so this needs answering before the bid, not after.
Does Florida require a licensed contractor for network cabling?
Yes. Florida’s DBPR states plainly that installing wiring within a structure, including computer networks, requires a license — typically the Limited Energy Systems Specialty class, which covers wiring, raceway, conduit and fiber optics up to 98 volts. Certified license holders can work statewide; registered holders are limited to the county that licensed them, and you can verify either at DBPR’s public license lookup.
How long does it take to port our phone numbers to the new office?
A truly simple port — a single line with no complex switch features — is a one-business-day obligation under FCC rules, and a non-simple port is four. But most business moves aren’t simple: multiple lines, hunt groups and rollovers push you into multi-day intervals, and roughly 20 numbers or more is handled as a project port with a date negotiated in advance. Start the port paperwork weeks before the move, not the week of.
What’s the difference between “we tested it” and certification?
A wiremap test says the pairs are in the right order. Certification runs each link against the TIA performance limits with a certification tester and produces a report — insertion loss, return loss, NEXT, crosstalk — which is what manufacturers require before they’ll issue a system warranty. Ask for the certification reports as a deliverable in the scope, in writing.
Herb has helped Orlando and Central Florida businesses design, install, and support voice and data systems for decades — business phone systems, VoIP, and structured cabling. Questions about a new system or an old one? Reach OBTS at obtssolutions.com.
Moving offices in Orlando this year?
We’ll walk the new space, tell you what the ceiling and the lease are going to cost you, and build the cabling and phone timeline backward from your move date — before you’re the one holding a deadline.