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Part of Business internet: 4 differences from home service and 7 questions to ask
Business Internet Migration: What to Check Before Cutover
Business internet migration is a checklist: find everything tied to your public IP, overlap old and new service, keep your numbers, and cut over in stages.
Business internet migration—changing your internet connection—is not the same as changing your electricity supplier. Your address on the internet changes with it, and a surprising number of things know that address by number and will stop working the moment it changes.
That is the problem a migration plan exists to solve. The rest is scheduling.
What to take away
- Your public address will change. Everything that knows it by number must be found before cut-over, not after.
- Overlap the two services. A few weeks of paying twice is cheaper than a day of paying nobody.
- Keep the numbers. Local number portability is an FCC rule, and the Letter of Agency you sign is what starts the port.
- Cut over on a quiet afternoon with a test list and a rollback that takes one minute.
Two kinds of migration
Same building, new provider. The new service is installed alongside the
Two migration scenarios
Same building, new provider
- Install
- Alongside old service
- Lead time
- Proven before cut-over
- Cut-over
- Move when proven
- Gap plan
- Old service as rollback
New building
- Install
- Order at lease signing
- Lead time
- Longer than quoted
- Cut-over
- Construction timeline uncontrolled
- Gap plan
- Cellular bridge in advance
New building. Everything here applies, plus a construction timeline you do not control. Order the new service the day the lease is signed, expect the lead time to be longer than quoted, and plan a bridge for the gap; a cellular service set up in advance, as described in 5G business internet, is the usual one.
Who sells the new line changes with the address: the cable operator (Comcast Business, Spectrum Business), the phone company (AT&T Business, Verizon Business), or a fiber carrier such as Lumen. The mechanics below are the same whoever it is; what changes is the lead time and the contract.
Find everything that knows your address by number
Your connection has a public address. On a business service it is often
Find everything tied to your address
- Site-to-site links and remote access
- Allow-lists at other organizations
- DNS records pointing at the office
- The phone system
- Cameras, alarm monitoring, building systems
- Mail sent from on-premises equipment
Find everything that knows your address
- Site-to-site links and remote access.Any VPN between offices, or any arrangement that lets staff or a supplier connect in, is configured with the address at both ends.
- Allow-lists at other organizations.A bank portal, a supplier's system, a payment gateway, a customer's network that only accepts connections from your address. These are the ones you find out about afterwards, from someone else's support desk.
- DNS records that point at the office.Anything you host on the premises, or any remote-access name, has a record with the old address in it. Lower its time-to-live in advance so the change propagates quickly.
- The phone system.If it lives on your premises, the provider may be registered against your address, and its inbound traffic is aimed at it. Hosted systems usually re-register on their own, but check.
- Cameras, alarm monitoring, building systems.Frequently configured by an installer with the address and never touched again.
- Mail.If any mail is sent from equipment on the premises, the new address has no sending reputation and other mail servers may treat it with suspicion for a while.
Write each one down with who owns it and what has to change. This list is most of the work. A migration with a complete list is an afternoon; one without it is a week of phone calls.
Treat the change as a small continuity exercise. FEMA's Ready.gov guidance on business continuity planning is a short frame for deciding what must not stop while you swap the thing everything runs over, and the Federal Communications Commission's rules on keeping your number when you change providers - local number portability - cover the step that is hardest to reverse.
Overlap, and why it is worth paying for
Have the new service installed and proven while the old one is still live.
Overlap versus hard cut-over
Overlap
- Install date
- Separate from cut-over
- Testing
- Days at busy hour
- Rollback
- Old service live
- Cost
- Two bills overlap
Hard cut-over
- Install date
- Must be cut-over date
- Testing
- None before switch
- Rollback
- No way back
- Cost
- One bill, high risk
- The install date does not have to be the cut-over date. Construction can slip without the business noticing.
- You can test the new service at the busy hour, from a wired machine, for several days, using the same measurements you keep for the old one.
- You can move one thing at a time and put it back if it misbehaves.
- The old service is your rollback for as long as you are paying for it.
The cost is the overlap of two bills for as long as both services are live: old monthly bill multiplied by the number of months both services run. If the old contract is still inside its term, closing it early can also trigger an early-termination fee. The contract states the formula—remaining monthly recurring charges multiplied by the months left, or a stated percentage, or a flat amount—so read the clause, apply its numbers, and add the result to the overlap before you decide. The alternative is a hard date on which the old service stops and the new one had better work, with no way back. Most businesses that regret a migration regret choosing the second option.
Check the old contract's notice terms early. Find the clause that states what notice you owe and what form it must take - a phone call to your account manager is not notice. Notice given after the new service is proven can still leave you paying for extra weeks. That is fine; it is the price of the safety.
The cut-over
Pick a quiet afternoon, tell staff, and have the person who can reverse it
in the building.
- Confirm the new service is live and the baseline measurement is acceptable.
- Confirm every item on the address list has been updated where it can be updated in advance, and that the ones that cannot have someone ready.
- Move the router's upstream connection from the old service to the new one. On many setups that is one cable; on others it is a configuration change. Know which before the day.
Cut-over sequence
- Confirm new service live and baseline acceptable
- Confirm address list updated or someone ready
- Move router upstream from old to new
- Run the test list
- If unfixable in minutes, move cable back
The test list
Post-cut-over test list
- Browse from wired and wireless machines
- Send and receive email
- Make and receive phone calls, check caller ID
- Take a test payment on card terminal
- Have a remote staff member connect in
- Confirm bank, supplier, customer allow-lists
- Check alarm and cameras report normally
- Test external reachability from cellular
- Confirm each item on the address list from the other sidethe bank portal, the supplier system, the customer network.
- If anything must be reachable from outside, try it from a mobile on cellular.
Do this during the overlap, on the new service, before the old one is canceled. Then leave both running for a week, because the fault that appears is the one on the monthly invoice run or the Friday backup.
Closing the old service
- If any phone numbers were tied to the old service, port them before it is canceled, never after. Under the FCC's local number portability rules, the new provider files the port and the Letter of Agency it hands you to sign is the authorization that starts it; ask for it before you give the old provider notice. See
Closing the old service
- Give notice in required form, keep confirmation
- Establish equipment return by when and how
- Port phone numbers before cancellation
- Update setup records with new details
- Cancel separately billed add-ons
business phone numbers for what can go wrong.
- Remove the old service's details from the setup records and put the new ones in.
- Cancel any add-ons billed separately that people forgetextra addresses, a managed router, a support tier.
Common questions
Can I keep my public address when I change provider?
Almost never. Addresses belong to the provider's network. Plan for a change even if someone tells you it might be possible.
How long should the overlap be?
Long enough to include your busiest day and a full billing or backup cycle. For most businesses that is a few weeks after the new service is proven, but the honest answer is: until the test list has passed on a busy day, plus a margin.
What if the new provider slips?
That is why the old service is still running. The migration plan should not have a date in it that the business depends on; it should have a set of conditions. When they are met, you cut over.
Is this the moment to change the router too?
Change one thing at a time. If the router must change, do it before or after the migration, not during it, so that when something fails you know which change caused it. Choosing the new service itself is covered in provider comparisons.
