Moving office - what order to make the calls

[#1]

Hi everyone
We're a small business looking to move to a different office, within the same office building. It's a 4 office 50s/60s style building, so the facilities aren't the most modern.
I'm guessing this won't be as straight forward as just switching over some patch leads in a central cabinet in the building though!
Currently we have 2 BT lines: 1 phone (actually 3 lines so we can make/receive 3 simultaneous calls), and the other is a fax which has our PN broadband on it as well.
We also have a Norstar Meridian box thing which controls our internal phone system.
We would like to keep our existing telephone/fax numbers, and keep PN as our broadband provider
So in what order do we need to contact people?
- Tell BT our move date
- Then contact Plusnet to do the broadband move per point #2 on this page... http://www.plus.net/support/customer_service/house_moving.shtml#samenumber
- Then get our local telephone system supplier to come round and move the phone cabinet
Or is this a good time for me to start looking into Asterisk and hosting our phone number with a VoIP provider?
Thanks, B

[#2]

Assuming that sufficient pairs run into the office you want to move to, its a very simple process at a physical level.
All that needs to be done is to trace the cables back to a point where they split from the incoming cable, into the various pairs running to the different offices.
This may be as simple as a box somewhere inside your building, or perhaps on the outside.
It may also be that the change needs to be performed up a pole, or in a street cabinet, depending on the configuration of the incoming cables/pairs.
The trouble is, its virtually impossible to get the right physical order to the people who could make the change.
Its almost inevitable that the procedure will involve a 'house move' type process, with ceases and re-provides occurring.
Its extremely frustrating, as you end up paying far more than you need to in reality, and it often takes longer too.
I've experienced similar difficulties in trying to find somebody to speak to in order to arrange for an engineer to swap an incoming line here from one DP (Distribution Point) to another.
The line is used as a fax line, and also has our ADSL running on it.
The change is simply a physical re-jumpering of the lines, but everybody I speak to wants to cease the line, and re-provide it on the new DP.
I imagine yours is slightly harder, since you will presumably have a change of address too?
If the [billing] address remains the same, I'd be very tempted to have a look at the wiring, and look to re-jumper them myself if I could locate a box locally.
Its technically not allowed for an end user to re-jumper the pairs in a BT DP, however the Openreach chaps who attend my site are never surprised that their records dont reflect reality to the letter.
They also 'bodge' a few bits themselves too, often borrowing pairs of my cables around the site to route their lines down.

[#3]

Wouldn't be the case that the building wiring should be lefty untouched - i.e. the wires between the DP and the rooms, and the reconfigouration is done at the exchange ??.
An the Nortel Meridian is a digital exchange, so that is why the ADSL shares the same pair as the fax.
But if you have a local telecom company supplying the exchange - they should know all about this ?.

[#4]

Quote from: batfastad

Ha!  The system lost my reply and posted the original topic!!!!!!