The lease is signed, the move date is on the calendar, and somebody has already ordered boxes. The desks, the chairs and the espresso machine will all survive the move. Whether anyone can work on day one comes down to something less visible — an internet circuit that needed to be ordered two months before the trucks.
Almost none of the IT work in an office move is hard. What hurts companies is doing the right tasks in the wrong week — and the longest deadline starts roughly eight weeks out, which may already be closer than you'd like.
Eight weeks out: order the internet circuit
Internet service is the long pole of the whole move, because it is the one item money cannot compress. There is no rush fee that jumps a provider's provisioning queue, and no technician you can hire to make fiber appear in a building that doesn't have it.
As of September 2026, typical lead times look like this: when a provider already serves the building — the industry term is on-net — installation usually takes two to four weeks. A dedicated fiber circuit, the business-grade kind that comes with a service-level agreement, commonly takes 60 to 90 days. And when the building needs construction to reach fiber at all, permits and trenching can stretch the wait past four months.
So this is the first call, before floor plans and before furniture. Ask the landlord which providers already serve the building and where their service enters it. If you are still negotiating the lease, ask before you sign — an address with one slow option is a fact worth knowing while you can still walk away. Then place the order, even if details are unsettled; you can change the speed tier later, but you cannot change your place in the queue.
Keep service at the old office running until the new circuit is live and tested — the overlap costs one extra month of internet and buys you a working business. A move is also the cheapest moment to add a second line from a different provider — backup internet is easier to justify before the first outage than after it.
Four weeks out: walk the space and settle the phones
The cabling walk-through
Take a floor plan to the new space and mark where every desk, printer, TV, camera and Wi-Fi access point will live. Count the network drops you need and compare that with the jacks in the walls — offices routinely come cabled for a different company's layout, and pulling new runs takes days when the building requires after-hours work or a certified installer. Find the room where the internet service terminates, because that is where your rack goes, and check it has power, ventilation and a door that locks. The full shopping list for that room is in our small office network guide.
The phone and number plan
If your phones are already cloud VoIP, they follow the internet — plug them in at the new office and update your E911 address with the provider, so an emergency call reports the right building. If you are still on copper lines or an on-premise PBX, the move is the moment to switch to VoIP rather than pay to relocate equipment that is on its way out.
Either way, guard the number. Porting a single number is quick — FCC rules require simple ports to complete in one business day — but multi-line business ports routinely run one to three weeks in practice, as of September 2026. Schedule the port for after the new circuit is live, and never cancel the old phone service until the port has completed. A cancelled account releases its numbers, and a released number is very hard to get back.
Two weeks out: verify the backups and label the teardown
Before anything is unplugged, run a full backup and restore a file from it to prove it works. A backup you have never restored from is a rumor. If the move involves a server or a NAS, that verified backup is your insurance against the one bad bump in the truck.
Then prepare the teardown so reassembly is mechanical:
- Photograph the rack and the back of every device before touching a cable.
- Label both ends of every cable, and put a numbered sticker on every device keyed to a position on the new floor plan.
- Decide which pieces travel with a person instead of the movers — the server, the NAS and any external drives ride in a car, because hard drives and freight handling do not mix.
- List everything that references the old office's fixed IP address — VPN configurations, vendor allowlists, camera and alarm monitoring, remote access. The new circuit almost always comes with new addresses, and each of those references breaks silently.
Move week: network first, furniture second
Get into the space a day or two ahead of the trucks if the lease allows it. The first job is to test the new circuit at the point where it enters the building, with a laptop plugged straight into the provider's equipment. If the circuit is dead, you want the provider working the problem on Tuesday — not discovered on moving day with thirty people standing around.
Then build outward in order: the firewall first, then switches, then Wi-Fi access points, then the server or NAS. Test a laptop at each desk drop while the rooms are still empty — finding a dead jack in an empty room takes a minute, and finding it behind an installed bank of desks takes an afternoon.
Do this and the actual move day is an anticlimax: furniture goes in, computers land on desks, cables reach labelled jacks, and things work.
Day one: printers, Wi-Fi and the things everyone forgot
Whatever you tested, day one finds the leftovers. Printers are the classic — they wake up on a new network with new addresses, and every computer that printed to the old address now cannot. Re-adding the print queues takes minutes once you know that is the problem. Printers are also fond of joining the guest Wi-Fi and vanishing from the office network entirely.
Then run down the short list that gets forgotten in every move:
- Scan-to-email on the copier — it carries its own mail settings, which rarely survive a network change.
- The conference-room TV and whatever box drives screen sharing.
- The alarm panel and any fire or elevator lines — these are often analog lines that did not move with the phones and need their own plan.
- Card readers and the point-of-sale terminal, if you take payments.
- The postage meter, the label printer, the door-access controller — anything with an Ethernet cable and no keyboard.
If the circuit is live but the office behind it will not behave — the VPN, the VLANs, a printer that refuses to be found — that is remote-fix territory. A technician on Koadi can configure a firewall and chase down a misbehaving subnet over a screen-share, usually the same day.
Having the new office working before the boxes arrive
Koadi designs and installs small-business networks end to end, and an office move is exactly that job: chasing the circuit order, walking the site, running the cabling, building the rack, cutting the phones over — then supporting it all afterwards. If you would rather hand off one piece, or the whole calendar, post the job free in plain words. Vetted, identity-verified technicians pick it up; you set a fixed price or take bids; and payment sits in escrow until you approve the finished work. Remote help covers every US state, evenings included, and on-site visits come through local vetted technicians — so the walk-through and the cable runs are covered, not just the configuration.