Building Technology, ISP Requests and Your Building Engineer’s Schedule

Property managers understand the logistics involved with maintaining the operations for commercial office buildings. For telecommunications infrastructure maintenance, an upgrade to a tenant’s service entails much more than just a simple flip of a switch.

Each time a tenant has a service request, the building engineers are often required to escort the contracted technicians while they are on site. This activity is repeated every time, for every tenant, for every request.

Lessons Learned

To maximize efficiency, standardizing procedures for Internet Service Provider (ISP) technician visits is critical. For each technician to fulfill the contracted task, the building engineering staff should:

• Ensure the technician is scheduled to be on site/verify with tenants
• Grant access to the building’s demarcation point (demarc), riser closet, and all common area telecommunications spaces
• Escort technicians to minimize time on site and possible accidental disconnects. This practice offers the best safeguarding for the network operations
• Update telecommunications documentation with all new Moves/Adds/Changes to ensure any future requests can be accommodated and outages can be more easily resolved
• Ensure all telecommunications infrastructure spaces are locked upon the technician’s departure

Even after the engineer has completed the tasks associated with a ISP technician visit, they still need to document all of the work done in the space to ensure they can rely on having accurate records when future work is ordered. Often, this task is completely overlooked and most of the work goes undocumented resulting in messy and unlabeled telecom closets, unsecured riser spaces, and ultimately longer and more expensive ISP technician visits in the future.

A Better Approach. A Better Solution.

All of these tasks have historically been completed by the building’s in-house management or engineering teams. An alternative to the repetitive cycle of escorting technicians is to partner with a riser management company.

Riser management companies offer an array of services, which often include not only escorting technicians but the use of their own technicians who are familiar with the building, which drastically reduces the time needed to perform service maintenance and upgrades.

More Than Just Techs-On-Call

Comprehensive riser management companies will also provide an actively maintained infrastructure database in addition to the building technology infrastructure services they offer, to ensure that the building’s technology and it’s critical network infrastructure is running at it’s maximum capacity regardless of what type of work is being completed.

Other advantages to partnering with a riser management company include complementary consultation services for tenants and the assurance that the infrastructure is being secured by reputable, knowledgeable technicians, and that the tenants are aware of the priority the building’s management team places on the availability of reliable internet service.

With a full-service riser management company, property managers can relieve some the burden of routine ISP visits and documentation maintenance for their building engineers, provide additional services for their tenants, and secure priority response services for any type of outage or service requests.