Your building’s connectivity is part of its modern day foundational infrastructure. It’s as important as any other utility, like the water, the heating or the electricity.
For building managers, poor connectivity impacts tenant churn and property value. For tenants and businesses themselves, it hampers productivity and growth.
Having connected over 2,750 offices since 2016 with full-fibre connectivity, we’ve seen building landlords and large commercial tenants run into a number of specific broadband-related blunders.
1. Underbuilding connectivity (and needing a costly retrofit)
The most glaring, common and expensive mistake is to underestimate how much bandwidth your users need.
500 Mbps per tenant space might have sufficed over recent years, but with the rise of cloud-based workflows, hybrid working and AI tools, it’s fast becoming obsolete.
1 Gbps is rapidly becoming the new minimum standard, especially for businesses that rely on video conferencing and cloud-based working, such as creative and design agencies, fintech companies and architecture practices – indeed, any business working with large files and real-time rendering.
Not only this, but your user’s bandwidth demands are only going to grow. AI tools like Copilot, ChatGPT and Midjourney are already embedded in daily working routines, generating content, analysing and processing media. Activities like 8K video editing, CAD file sharing and continuous cloud syncing are all putting pressure on legacy tech.
To avoid the dreaded retrofit, it’s always smarter to overprovision fibre infrastructure and future-proof your building. For example, a multi-gigabit backhaul can deliver 10 Gbps right now, with headroom to scale up to over 40 Gbps in future.
Check out our quick guide on how much fibre connectivity you should build into your commercial property.
2. Underestimating the impact of downtime
Whether you’re a building manager fielding complaints or a tenant yourself, you don’t need us to tell you about the disastrous consequences of downtime.
Even intermittent blackouts can have significant financial implications, to the tune of £3.7bn and 50 million hours each year alone.
Constant uptime is especially important for users for whom real-time access to the cloud and collaboration platforms is mission critical, such as those in healthcare, finance, legal and customer support.
To guard against damaging outages, many full fibre providers offer zero-loss connectivity. As the name suggests, this means your network has built-in resilience and delivers guaranteed uptime.
These solutions can be backed by an enterprise-grade service level agreement (SLA). This is a formal contract that stipulates expectations on speeds, uptime and customer support. Essentially, peace of mind that your connectivity will never be a point of failure.
3. Leaving connectivity to individual tenant spaces
You might think you’re doing your building users a service by giving them the freedom to sort out their own connectivity and the kind of speeds they’d like, but it’s a recipe for chaos.
Not only does it result in inconsistency across the building, which decreases your standardisation, but it results in duplicated cabling and more wayleave headaches than necessary.
77% of UK business leaders are looking to move to a new office space in the next five years. Interestingly, connectivity is second only in importance to location in property leasing decisions.
Investing in a scalable, building-wide full-fibre network could be a key differentiator and marketability of your property.
4. Overlooking fibre routing when renovating
When refurbishing, it’s natural to put your full focus on visible and physical improvements – flooring, lighting furniture and HVAC system – at the expense of non-visible (but equally essential) upgrades.
This is a huge missed opportunity: a new renovation is the perfect time to transform your building’s digital and network infrastructure. Why not integrate fibre upgrades into your renovation plans?
With structured cabling, risers and cabinets, it’s possible to make all the necessary improvements to upgrade legacy technology to accommodate gigabit-speeds whilst the works are underway.
A building makeover is a timely, opportune moment to build more smart office space and Internet of Things (IoT) to support and future-proof your property (rather than having to expensively retrofit later on).
5. Delaying rollout due to wayleave fears
Wayleave agreements are legal contracts that grant suppliers permission to install and maintain network infrastructure on private land.
Faced by what is perceived as a big, costly, bureaucratic blocker, many building owners and managers choose to kick their full-fibre fitout into the long grass.
There’s some justification to these concerns. Wayleave delays are the number one barrier to fibre rollout in the UK – negotiations involving many stakeholders can be particularly complex, lasting for months or even years.
Legal fees alone for negotiating wayleaves can run into the thousands, and that’s not accounting for the actual payment. It’s enough to derail many projects.
However, the vast majority of projects do not experience these sort of costly delays.
This is especially true if you work with a specialist network provider. From checking Land Registry and arranging contract templates to negotiating terms and sorting out signatories, work with a supplier who is experienced and able to seamlessly manage the entire wayleave process, from end-to-end.
Optinet: world-class commercial connectivity, without costly mistakes
The majority of commercial landlords have already taken steps to boost their connectivity. Have you? It’s not too late to get started.
At Optinet, we’ve implemented full-fibre network solutions in over 200 commercial buildings and connected over 2,750 office spaces, with an average deployment time of only 48 hours. Take a look at some of our projects on behalf of some of the UK’s most prestigious buildings and organisations.
We bring a unique understanding of the pain points and common challenges faced by landlords, owners, developers and management teams. Every building is different, of course – we’ll develop a bespoke strategy that delivers future-proofed connectivity whilst avoiding costly connectivity missteps and mistakes.
To take your connectivity to the next level, register your building and let us do the rest.