The most expensive mistakes in an office fit-out are made before anyone thinks about IT. Cable routes that were never allowed for, a comms cupboard with no power and no air, and a carrier order placed after the lease was signed instead of before. Two of those three cost you plasterboard to fix. The third costs you an office you cannot trade from.
Fit-out IT is the permanent technology infrastructure built into a tenancy while it is under construction: the structured cabling, the pathways it runs in, the comms room, the access point and camera positions, the floor boxes, and the carrier service that feeds all of it. It is defined by the fact that most of it becomes inaccessible once the building is finished.
This is written for the operations manager running the project, sequenced against the build programme rather than grouped by technology. Work through it in order.
Stage 1: before the builder starts
These are design decisions. Every one of them is cheap now and expensive later.
Order the carrier service. This is the single most common cause of a business moving into a new office with no internet, and it is entirely avoidable. A new service at a new address is not a phone call, it is an order with a build behind it. nbn is explicit that for Enterprise Ethernet it designs and builds a new fibre connection tailored to the premises, that installation is handled by specialist project teams for complex environments like shopping centres, business parks and high-rise buildings, and that a committed delivery date is confirmed with your service provider. Civil works may be involved.
nbn does not publish a delivery target in business days, and that is the useful finding. There is no customer-facing figure at all. The only delivery number anywhere in nbn’s published material sits in the wholesale agreement, in the Service Levels Schedule for the nbn Enterprise Ethernet product module, and it is not what people assume: nbn aims to provide a Committed Delivery Date within 10 business days of the Order Accepted Notification, and that target is expressly stated to be non-binding, aspirational, and not even reported to the retail service provider. Ten business days to be told a date, not ten business days to get a service.
What does bind is the Committed Delivery Date itself, once given. If nbn delivers late against it, rebates accrue to your retail service provider: for an Ordered Product with a Committed Delivery Date on or after 15 November 2021, 100 per cent of the monthly recurring charge whether delivery is 5 to 9 business days late or 10 business days or more late. Read that carefully. The rebate is payable to your provider, not to you, and it does not compensate you for a building you cannot trade from.
The practical consequence for a fit-out programme is that your carrier lead time is a retail service provider commitment, not an nbn published standard, and it will vary by address, by building complexity and by whether a build is required. Do not plan against a number you found on a comparison site. Make the retailer put the Committed Delivery Date in writing, along with what happens contractually if it slips, and treat the date before you have that as unknown.
Place the order the week the lease is signed, not the week before handover. If the build timeline will not make your move date, you need to know early enough to arrange an interim service. This is the point at which you should be ordering the carrier service first and building the rest of the programme around it.
Fix the comms room location on the drawings. Not “somewhere near the back”. A specific room, with a door, a dedicated power circuit and a way for heat to leave. Get it onto the architectural set before the layout is frozen, because moving it later moves every cable in the building. There is a full treatment of how to design the comms room itself, and it should be read at this stage, not at fitout.
Set the headcount you are cabling for. Not today’s headcount. The headcount at the end of the lease, plus the desks you will add when you take the adjacent tenancy. Outlets are cheap while the walls are open and brutal afterwards.
Specify the cabling grade above current need. Structured cabling for commercial premises in Australia and New Zealand is covered by AS/NZS 11801.1:2019, which is the local adoption of the ISO/IEC 11801 series and replaces the older AS/NZS 3080. The grade you choose sets the ceiling on everything for the life of the fit-out.
The reasoning is simple. Active equipment gets replaced every four to six years. Cable in a wall gets replaced when you next renovate, which might be never. Wireless access points and cameras increasingly draw more power over the same cable, and higher Power over Ethernet classes generate more heat in the bundle. Specify the higher category, specify shielded where you are running near plant or lift motors, and accept the extra cost now.
Decide the access point positions from a plan. Not by counting rooms. Wireless design starts from the floor plan, the wall construction, the ceiling type and where people will actually sit, and it produces marked positions with a cable to each one. There is a fuller treatment of designing wireless coverage from a plan which applies just as much to an office as a warehouse. Add a spare cable to every position and one or two more positions than the design calls for, because a plasterboard ceiling is a one-time opportunity.
Decide what else rides on the network. Access control readers, door controllers, cameras, intercoms, room booking panels, digital signage, EFTPOS. Each of these needs a cable and most need PoE. Work out CCTV and access control on the same network now, because a door controller discovered at fitout is a cable that has to be surface mounted.
Stage 2: before plasterboard goes up
This is the expensive one. Once the sheets are on, everything below costs you a repair, a repaint and a delay.
First fix the cabling. Every outlet, every access point, every camera, every door, every meeting room, every floor box, run back to the comms room. Overshoot on quantity. A spare outlet costs a fraction of a retrofit.
Get the separation from power right. Telecommunications cabling in Australia is governed by AS/CA S009:2020 Installation requirements for customer cabling, the Wiring Rules published by the Australian Telecommunications Alliance. The ACMA makes it mandatory through the Telecommunications Cabling Provider Rules 2014. Among other things it sets out that telecommunications cabling must be separated from electrical cabling. This is not a best-practice suggestion. It is a compliance requirement, and it is enforced through registered cabler obligations.
Practically, this means the electrical contractor and the cabling contractor need to agree routes before either starts, and that the separation applies in trays, in conduits, in risers and at the outlet. Data and power sharing a stud cavity because it was convenient on the day is how a fit-out fails its own certification.
Pathways and spaces. AS/NZS 3084:2017 covers telecommunications pathways and spaces for commercial buildings. This is the standard that governs cable tray, risers, conduits, ceiling routes and the equipment room itself. Ask the cabling contractor to reference it in their scope. If they cannot, that tells you something.
Conduits for door hardware and access control. Every controlled door needs a path from the door frame to the controller and from the controller to the comms room. Electric strikes, maglocks, readers, request-to-exit sensors and door position switches all need cable. Doors are usually the last thing decided and the first thing that cannot be retrofitted neatly, because the conduit has to be in the frame.
Floor boxes and desk power. Fix the desk layout before the slab penetrations and the floor box positions are set. Every floor box needs both power and data, sized for the desk pod it serves and for one more person at that pod than the layout shows. Under-floor and in-slab routes are permanent, so get the count right.
Meeting rooms. Every meeting room needs at least a cabled connection to the display position, a cabled connection to the camera and speaker position, power at both, and a route between them that does not cross the room at head height. Decide the mounting height of the display now, because the outlet has to be behind it.
Comms room backing and containment. Plywood backing boards, cable entry points, tray into the room, and the floor space for the rack marked out and protected. If a rack is going in, the door and the route to it need to fit the rack.
Take photographs. Before the sheets go on, photograph every wall with cable in it, with a tape measure in shot. This is the cheapest as-built documentation you will ever produce and you will use it within two years.
Stage 3: at fitout
Second fix. Terminate the outlets, fit the plates, mount the access points, hang the cameras, terminate the patch panels.
Build the rack. Patch panels at the top, switches beneath them, room for growth, cable management between every panel and switch, and the carrier equipment positioned to the carrier’s own requirements. nbn’s BNTD location guide is worth reading before the rack is laid out. For a rack-mounted Enterprise Ethernet install it specifies a minimum rack depth of 300mm for the tray, a mandatory 1RU clearance for cooling the BNTD, a minimum 26mm clearance at the cooling vents, a recommended minimum front clearance of 900mm, a 240V general power outlet or IEC C13 PDU within 1m, a maximum mounting height of 2.4m with below 1.8m preferred, and a communications earth or rack earth. Space reserved for the carrier must stay reserved.
Label as you go. Administration of communications cabling systems is covered by AS/NZS 3085.1:2004. A labelling scheme decided at handover is a labelling scheme that never gets applied. Decide it before termination and apply it at both ends.
Power the room properly. Dedicated circuits, enough outlets, and the UPS in place before equipment goes in rather than added afterwards.
Stage 4: at handover
This is where you find out whether you got what you paid for.
Certification testing, not a link light. Every cable run must be tested against the performance class it was specified to, with a calibrated field tester, and the results supplied as a report per outlet. A cable that carries traffic today is not the same as a cable that passes certification. The difference shows up at higher speeds and higher PoE loads, sometimes years later.
The cabler’s statement of compliance. Under the Telecommunications Cabling Provider Rules 2014, after finishing a job a registered cabler must prepare a written statement certifying that the work complies with the Wiring Rules, give a copy to the customer who commissioned the work, give a copy to their employer or contractor, and keep a copy. You are the customer. Ask for it. If nobody can produce it, the work was not done by a registered cabler or the paperwork was skipped, and either way you have a problem to solve now rather than at the next audit.
As-built documentation. Floor plan with every outlet numbered, patch schedule, rack elevation, access point positions with names, camera and door positions, carrier service details with the service ID, and the photographs from stage two. This should be handed over as a set, not reconstructed later by whoever inherits the site.
Warranty and defects. Get the cabling warranty terms in writing and note the defects liability period. Walk the site with the cabling contractor and list anything unterminated, unlabelled, unfixed or untested before you sign off.
A functional test of the things that are not cables. Every meeting room display, every access point at the far corners with an actual device, every door, every camera view, the phone system at every desk, and a full failover test of the internet service if you have a second link.
The two failures worth naming
Almost every fit-out that goes badly fails in one of two ways.
The first is the carrier service. Everything else in this list can be recovered with money and a weekend. A fibre build that has not started cannot be accelerated by shouting at anyone. Order it first.
The second is the comms room. It gets allocated to whatever space nobody else wanted, which is usually a cupboard with one power point and no ventilation, and within eighteen months it is the hottest and least accessible room in the building. Design it deliberately.
If your fit-out is also a relocation, the move itself is a separate piece of work with its own sequence, and the cabling side of it is covered in professional data cabling.
Send us the floor plan and the build programme and we will mark up the IT scope against your milestones, including the date the carrier order has to be placed. TechAssist does cabling, comms rooms and fit-out IT in-house rather than subcontracting it. Call 1300 028 324 or use https://techassist.au/contact/.
