IT network for office buildings

Three reference standards govern your commercial IT network infrastructure in France. The generic cabling standard for commercial premises sets the maximum copper permanent link reach at 90 m, which covers nearly all floor plates below 1500 m². ISO/IEC 11801 defines the transmission classes: Class EA for category 6A (10 Gb/s) and Class FA for category 7A. The Labour Code (R4214-1) requires three separate pathway levels between high-voltage, VDI and smoke extraction, accessible for maintenance.

The most frequent blind spot we audit when taking over a lease: a non-Fluke-certified network exposes your IT department to intermittent failures (degraded NEXT, ACR-F) with no contractual recourse. Certifying each link transfers responsibility for the cable pulling to the cabling contractor for 25 years.

Common sizing benchmarks in commercial real estate: dual RJ45 outlets at a rate of one per 10 m², Wi-Fi 6 access points between 1 per 80 to 120 m² in partitioned offices and 1 per 50 to 70 m² in dense open spaces. For an 850 m² floor plate, this represents 85 outlets and 8 to 17 access points depending on occupancy density.

We favour Energy Star active equipment and passively cooled racks under 12U to align your deployment with a digital sobriety trajectory.

In practice at Kytom, fibre to the desk (FTTO) is not justified on the vast majority of French commercial floor plates. The 90 m threshold covers nearly all floor plates below 1500 m², and 10 Gb/s over cat. 6A absorbs office, ToIP and 4K videoconferencing uses over the duration of a 9-year lease.

On a mid-sized floor plate, 6A copper makes up the bulk of the linear footage, with fibre reserved for vertical risers.

VDI racks are sized at 24U for 50 to 80 workstations, 42U beyond 100 workstations or when integrating ToIP, video surveillance and access control in the same rack. The main server room is positioned on an intermediate level (3rd to 5th floor in a renovated Haussmann building), with distribution via OM4 multimode fibre to the floor racks.

When this architecture is not the right one. Below 30 workstations or on a single floor plate under 300 m² with no ToIP/IoT constraint, the investment in cat. 6A and redundant OM4 fibre exceeds an 8-year economic payback: a standard cat. 6 solution with a 24-port switch is sufficient. Likewise, for a lease under 3 firm years, the 25-year warranty loses its accounting value. In that case, it is better to lease the active equipment with minimal cabling.

The recent projects we have delivered with documented before/after measurement show significant gains in three areas for your real estate department and your IT department.

• Performance: moving from a cat. 5e/Wi-Fi 5 infrastructure to a cat. 6A/Wi-Fi 6E deployment markedly improves Wi-Fi throughput and brings ToIP latencies below 10 ms, with clearly enhanced user satisfaction in the weeks following delivery.
• Operations: consolidating the VDI racks reduces the footprint of technical rooms and frees up several square metres that can be reused as work areas. On an 850 m² floor plate, this gain can represent up to 1.8% of usable floor area without structural reconfiguration.
• Financial: the 10-year TCO of a certified structured network is significantly lower than that of a patchwork of successive extensions, thanks to reduced corrective interventions and the guaranteed lifespan of the components. Fluke certification transfers responsibility for the cable pulling to the cabling contractor for the duration of the lease, which secures your maintenance provisions.

To these direct gains is added documented R4214-1 compliance from delivery, enforceable during internal inspections or cyber insurer audits that now require an up-to-date network map.

1. Technical audit
   Survey of the floor plate, mapping of constraints (false ceiling, concrete slab, existing ducts), inventory of planned workstations and target uses (ToIP, IoT, videoconferencing). Duration: 2 to 3 weeks.
2. Design
   RJ45 cat. 6A layout plan at a ratio of 1 dual outlet per 10 m², sizing of the 24U to 42U VDI rack, routing of inter-floor OM4 fibre risers and selection of the main server room. Duration: 3 weeks.
3. Coordination of trades
   Management of cabling contractors, electricians and network integrators on a shared schedule, with a single Kytom account manager on the client side and a dedicated IT department interface for VLAN preparation.
4. Deployment
   Pulling of cat. 6A and OM4/OS2 fibre cables, patching in the rack, installation of 30 W PoE+ switches, Wi-Fi 6/6E access points, commissioning of voice, data and IoT VLANs. Duration: 5 to 6 weeks.
5. Acceptance and cutover
   Fluke category 6A certification on 100% of links, Wi-Fi coverage measurements with RSSI above -65 dBm across 95% of work areas, cutover within 4 hours of planned downtime, handover of as-built documentation. Duration: 1 to 2 weeks.