Shared Walls, Borrowed Lines: A Telecoms Check-Up Before You Sign for a Serviced Office

Serviced offices are a decent deal on paper. You get a desk, a meeting room you book through an app, someone else to worry about the cleaner, and a broadband line that simply works when you plug in. For a small team that wants to get on with the job, that's genuinely appealing.

The catch is that almost none of it belongs to you. Not the router in the comms cupboard, not the circuit it sits on, and often not the phone number printed on your business cards. That's fine right up until the day you want to change something, fix something, or leave.

This isn't a scare story. Plenty of SMEs run happily in serviced buildings for years. But the telecoms side of the arrangement deserves a proper look before you sign, not after. Here's what to check.

Start with a boring question: whose name is on the invoice?

Ask the building operator for three things: the name of the account holder, the circuit reference, and who provides first-line support. The answer usually falls into one of three buckets.

The first is that the building has its own connection and sells you access to it. You're a sub-user, not a customer. The second is that a carrier or reseller has a contract with the operator and you sit behind it. The third, less common but not unheard of, is that each suite has its own line ordered by the operator on your behalf, sometimes with you named as the end user.

Only the third gives you anything close to a direct relationship with the provider. In the first two, you're relying on the operator's goodwill and their supplier's response times when something breaks at 8am on a Monday. That's not automatically a reason to walk away, but it does need to be priced in.

Your phone number doesn't belong to you in the way you think

This is the one that catches people out. In the UK, numbers are allocated to communications providers, not to businesses. The provider then assigns them to a customer. If the operator is the customer, you are not, and you have no automatic right to take that number with you.

Can it be ported? Sometimes, yes. Geographic numbers starting 01 and 02 and UK-wide 03 numbers can generally move between providers, but the request has to come from the account holder. That means a signed letter of authority from the building operator, cooperation from whoever holds the contract, and timing that fits with your move. If any of those three wobble, you're starting again with a new number and reprinting everything.

There's a simple way to sidestep the whole problem: bring your own numbers. Take a cloud phone service in your own name from day one, point it at the handsets or apps your team uses, and let the building's connectivity be nothing more than a pipe. The number lives with you, follows you to the next office, and doesn't care who owns the riser.

Read the connectivity detail, not the brochure

"Superfast fibre included" can mean a great many things. Before you commit, get answers on these:

• Is the circuit dedicated or contended? A shared line serving forty suites will feel different at 11am on a Tuesday than at 7pm on a Sunday.
• Do you get static IP addresses? If you're behind carrier-grade NAT, VPNs, hosted phone systems and remote access can all get awkward.
• What's the upload speed? Downloads sell the brochure, uploads run your calls and cloud apps.
• Is there a fair-use policy? Some inclusive packages throttle heavy use, and voice traffic is often the first thing to suffer.
• Who do you call when it's down, and what hours do they work? Ask for the actual support number and test it before signing.
• What's the escalation path if the building's supplier is the problem? "We'll log it with them" is not a service level.

If your business depends on calls, ask specifically whether voice traffic is prioritised on the shared network and whether the operator will guarantee anything around jitter and packet loss. Most won't, which is useful to know.

The exit clauses worth arguing about

Leases are full of small print, and telecoms tends to hide in the gaps between clauses. Look for these before you sign:

Notice periods that don't line up with your break. If you have to give three months' notice on telecoms but only one on the lease, you're paying for a service you can't use.

Reinstatement and removal charges. Who pays to take out cabling, handsets or a router when you go? Get a figure, or a cap, in writing.

Early termination charges passed through. Some operators reserve the right to recover their own supplier's exit fees from you if you leave mid-term.

Number release on exit. Ask for an explicit commitment that the operator will cooperate with a port request and won't withhold authorisation. Put a timescale on it.

Migration cooperation. A short clause obliging them to respond to a new provider's requests within a set number of working days is worth more than it sounds.

Change-of-control wording. If the building is sold, does your arrangement survive intact? A novation clause that protects your terms is a reasonable ask.

Watch the service charge for double-charging

Many serviced buildings levy a technology or IT charge on top of rent, separate from the broadband itself. That's fine if it's transparent. It's less fine if you're also paying a phone provider for connectivity the levy already covers, or if the levy funds a system you've opted out of.

Ask for a breakdown of what the technology charge covers. Then ask what happens if you bring your own line and don't use theirs. You may find the charge is fixed regardless, in which case you might as well use the included service and spend your budget elsewhere, such as a backup connection or better handsets.

If you want your own line, sort out access early

Bringing in your own circuit is often the cleanest answer, but it depends on the building. You'll need permission from the landlord or operator for an engineer to install, and in some cases a formal wayleave agreement for cabling through shared areas.

Ask three questions before you order anything: where does the circuit enter the building, is there capacity in the riser for another cable, and how long does permission typically take? Listed buildings, older conversions and multi-tenant floors can all add weeks. Also check who pays for the installation if you leave before the contract ends, because that's a conversation nobody enjoys having later.

Assume the shared connection will fail at some point

Shared infrastructure means shared failures. A faulty switch in the comms room takes out everyone, and you'll be waiting alongside thirty other tenants for someone to fix it.

That's an argument for having a fallback. A 4G or 5G router with a SIM on a cheap monthly plan costs very little and can keep a small team on calls for a day. If your phone system is cloud-based, staff can also divert to mobiles in seconds. Test that diversion once, deliberately, so nobody's learning the process during an outage.

A short checklist before you sign

Run through this with the operator and get answers in writing:

1. Who is the account holder and provider for the building's internet?
2. Is my suite's connectivity dedicated to me or shared?
3. Do I get static IPs, and how many?
4. Are phone numbers in my name, and can I port them out?
5. What's the notice period, and does it align with my lease break?
6. What charges apply on exit, including removal and reinstatement?
7. Can I install my own circuit, and who grants access?
8. What's the support number and hours, and is there any service level?
9. What does the technology charge cover, and can it be reduced?
10. What's the plan if the building's connection fails for a full working day?

None of this is exotic. It's just the sort of thing that gets skimmed when you're excited about the meeting room and the coffee machine. Get the answers early and you keep control of the two things that are genuinely painful to lose: your number, and your ability to walk away cleanly.

We're not lawyers, and none of the above is legal advice. But if a supplier or operator can't answer these questions cheerfully and in plain English, that tells you something useful about the next three years.