What’s in Your Telco Closets?
The telco closets in your building hold the heartbeat of your communications infrastructure. From the conduits and connections of miles of fiber and cables, the blinking equipment and the beeping devices, your telco rooms are vital to your building technology and your tenant’s daily operations.
The hub of your horizontal cabling system should be secure, well lit, and well organized. If one of your tenants has ordered a new service to be installed and implemented, will the contracted technician be able to determine which cables and equipment service that tenant? Ask these questions when considering your telco closets:
- Is there enough space in the telco closets to enable the technician to install the new cabling or equipment without accidentally bumping (and possibly disconnecting) the existing equipment?
- Is the telco closet tidy and organized? Is there any extraneous equipment that should be relocated to a more appropriate space?
- Is the cabling, switches, and equipment clearly labeled and is there enough light so that the tech can see the labels on the cables to ensure the correct ones are being used?
- Is your telco closet secure? Do you know who is going into these spaces, what authorizations and qualifications they have, and what work are they performing?
- Is your telco closet being used as a storage space for cleaning equipment, holiday decorations, bicycles or poker games?
- Is your documentation on the services, hardware, and access points to your building technology and spaces updated and reliable? Do you have a process to actively maintain your documentation?
Unmanaged Telco Closets Can be Costly
Any mistakes with the equipment or cables could interrupt service to tenants. Correcting these mistakes can be time-consuming and cost your tenants tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue and productivity.
Another situation to avoid is having tenant equipment in a telco closet. Data security for that tenant, and others, can be jeopardized. Tenant-owned or controlled equipment should always be located within that tenant’s space for their access and safekeeping.
An Ounce of Prevention…Actively Protect Your Building Technology
Managing the telco closets and associated telecommunications infrastructure (the riser system) has become more visible as a critical component of a property manager’s charter.
Taking a holistic approach to managing the telecommunications infrastructure, including the telco closets, offers many benefits to your staff and tenants:
- Protect your tenants’ services and boost your tenants’ confidence in your building technology
- Confidently direct technicians to the correct location of infrastructure equipment and cabling allows your engineering staff to fulfill their tasks without wasting time tracking down labels
- Having accurate documentation about the telco closets’ locations and equipment within each space will substantially reduce remediation time in cases of network outages.
- This information will also enable your team to better plan for future services and allow them to leverage the existing network to optimize productivity, support existing applications, and maintain information security.
- Optimize tenant service requests
- Prevents unauthorized access to your building technology and telco spaces
- Redundant or abandoned cabling and equipment should be removed to ensure space allocation
Proactively managing telco infrastructure and the building technology will protect telecommunications assets belonging to both the building and its tenants and may provide revenue opportunities for the building.
This task should include actively documenting all actions taken in support of your communications networks and services. This critical, but often overlooked step, can help the property management and engineering team plan future enterprise solutions, optimize current capacity, and greatly reduce installation time, procedural confusion, and frustrations associated with service and technology upgrades.
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