Itwerx is a managed IT provider serving businesses in Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Lynnwood, and office moves have been part of the work since 2005. This is what to test in a new space before you commit to it.
A continuity test is not enough
Moving into a space with existing network cabling means inheriting whatever decisions the previous installers made, and a simple continuity check will pass cabling that performs terribly once real traffic runs over it. A cheap installer pulling cable past something sharp can ground a single conductor without breaking continuity; the run passes the test with flying colors and then delivers heavy packet loss in production. An experienced telecom installer working from old habits can forget that network pinout is not interchangeable with telecom pinout, and the same thing happens: passes the test, fails in production.
What else to look for in existing wiring
Beyond those two, existing cabling in a new space can carry several other surprises:
- Runs between rooms that go nowhere useful – two jacks, neither of which actually traces back to the wiring closet.
- Split runs, where a single cable feeds two jacks – a trick that made sense twenty years ago and does not now.
- Wrong-spec cable, such as old Cat3 carried forward instead of replaced.
- A “refresh” done wrong – a new Cat6 pull terminated into old-style RJ45 hardware to save a few dollars, which caps the run at the old hardware’s performance.
- Solid core mixed up with stranded, by installers who did not know the difference mattered.
Get it properly tested, not just checked
Always have cabling in a new space verified properly rather than relying on continuity alone. A Fluke Networks-class cable tester that does line-speed verification is available for under a thousand dollars; a step up that maps the run, generates a report, checks endpoint detection and PoE voltage runs closer to five thousand. Either is a lot cheaper than the hours lost chasing a wonky patch cable or a warehouse VoIP phone that keeps glitching no matter how many times the handset gets swapped.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our hardware lifecycle work deals with – talk to us about yours.
