Warehouse 5
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Managed Service Provider (MSP)

Planning a One-Cable-at-a-Time Cutover

Legacy telecommunications and network room with analog phone equipment, a full-height rack, dense patch cabling, and older Cisco infrastructure.

This new customer onboarding might be my favorite one all year. Walking into this room feels like taking a trip back in time.

A legacy phone system is still running in parallel with the modern VoIP platform. Some users have both an analog phone and a VoIP phone on their desks, and the legacy system is still fed by a T1 over copper. The main rack has equipment that has been running for more than 20 years, including the original Cisco wireless controllers.

Our modernization plan is slow and deliberate. We will shift the existing equipment higher in the rack, mount the new equipment toward the bottom, and migrate one cable at a time. That gives us a clean rollback point during each step and helps prevent prolonged downtime during the cutover.

The old fiber was another surprise. Two IDFs are connected with OM1 fiber and SC connectors. It is old school, but our cable certifier confirmed that the installed runs support 10 gig at their current lengths. There is no reason to replace working infrastructure just because it is old.

For now, we are riding with the OM1 and SC connectors while we modernize everything around them. This site has a lot of history in the rack, and we cannot wait to start bringing it forward.