If you’re watching this video, it’s most likely because you’re ready to crank your connectivity up to 11. We’re honored that you’ve chosen Uniti as your communications provider and couldn’t be more thrilled to empower you to push your business forward to new heights. We also understand that change can be scary, and since we’re customer-obsessed, we want to help walk you through what to expect on your Uniti connectivity journey, from contract to activation. We break our process down into four main phases: plan and design, permissions, construct and splice, and activation.
First up is our plan and design phase. A Uniti site acquisition coordinator or outside plant engineer will contact you to schedule a site survey where you’ll walk through your business to determine the demarc location, the place where we’ll connect our fiber to the required equipment, and the private property portion of the fiber build into the building. We also highly recommend inviting your landlord to the sidewalk if your business is in a lease space. As they sign off on the final plans, we’ll also be required. Again, we are just looking for permission to build onto the property so that we install our fiber right where you want us to be, and it helps us not damage any of the existing infrastructure along the way. The Uniti field teammate will then input the scope of work into a computer program for our design team to draw up.
Simply put, we’ll have worked with you to determine the best path to get fiber into your building, and we’ll have created a customized plan for your Uniti solution. While all this site survey and design process is going on, we’ll also coordinate with our outside plant team to determine whether there’s a need to connect into the right-of-way adjacent to your business. This is the public property outside that carries utilities. Hopefully, our existing infrastructure is really close to your property, but sometimes we may need a permit with the city, county, state, or some other jurisdiction to get your business ready for fiber awesomeness, and once we are there, we can open up the internet pipes to full blast as your business needs grow.
The next step is the permissions phase. After our design team has finished and the plan has been approved by one of our engineers, our service delivery team will send over what’s called a green light package, or GLP, that shows the proposed plans to run fiber to your business. This is your opportunity to look through the plans and either approve them or request any changes that you feel are necessary. The change requests are then sent back to the design team, and they’ll work to make any requested revisions. Once you’re happy with the green light package, you will approve it with a signature through DocuSign, or we will send it to your landlord to sign for their approval. We want to get your service delivered as soon as we can and may need your assistance if the landlord isn’t responding in a timely fashion. At this point, the plan to light your business has been communicated, put down on paper by our design team, and approved by an engineer.
This brings us into the construction and splicing phase. Once the contractor has it on their schedule, the Uniti field representative will work with you to schedule a good time for construction to begin. For this step, it’s important for a contractor to have access to your property. Once construction is complete, we send over our splicing team to splice your cable into our network. The great part is that because we use cutting-edge entrance cables that have already been spliced 90% of the time, the splicer won’t need access to your property. They will connect what’s called a meet-me point in the right of way outside. Once splicing is complete, it’s time to activate.
For the final activation phase. A field tech will contact you to schedule a time to come by, turn up, and test the circuit. Once you’ve given them access to your property, they will install the necessary gear in the demarc location that you decided on in the planning stage. The field tech will then work with one of our network engineers to make sure your node is now connected to our network and will test it to make sure everything is working correctly. The tech will then clean up the workspace and leave you to enjoy your next level connectivity while our operations team performs final quality control protocols.
And that’s it. That’s the journey. You’re in good hands with Uniti, and we can’t wait to add you to our ever-expanding network. If you have any questions about any of our processes or procedures, please reach out to your account manager or assigned site acquisition coordinator. Welcome to the Uniti family.
