Fiber Optic Installation in Long Island City: Questions Answered
These are the questions developers, condo boards, retail owners, office tenants and coworking operators in Long Island City put to us before they commit. The answer comes first, then the reasoning; short practical points sit in the FAQ near the end of the page.
Towers that are still being finished
Our Court Square or Hunters Point tower only has a temporary certificate of occupancy and some floors are still under construction — can tenant or resident fiber go in now?
Usually yes, as long as the work is planned around the construction rather than against it. A temporary certificate lets people occupy the finished floors while the rest of the building is completed, and in that state the general contractor still controls the site, its schedule and its safety plan. So the first step is a conversation with the contractor's superintendent and the owner's representative: which floors are turned over, which shafts are still open, where our crew may store material, and whether the job still falls under a Site Safety Plan that requires SST-carded workers. Once that is agreed, we build the backbone in two passes. The occupied floors are spliced, terminated and tested straight away. The unfinished floors get their cable pulled and coiled in the closet with the strands capped, labelled and protected, so the drywall and ceiling trades cannot damage them.
The second pass happens when each raw floor is fitted out. The strands are spliced into the floor's enclosure, tested, and added to the strand map, without a fresh pull from the basement. Doing it this way prevents the most common trouble we see in newly finished towers: a riser that was "done" before the fit-out trades went through it, with crushed or cut cable nobody can account for. It also means the owner is not paying twice for vertical pathway. Tell us the floor-by-floor turnover dates and we will price both passes in one proposal.
Our tower has post-tensioned concrete floors — how does fiber get between floors without endangering a tendon?
By using the sleeves the building already has wherever possible, and by treating any new core as a structural decision rather than a drilling job. In a post-tensioned slab, steel tendons run through the concrete under very high tension; their depth varies with the slab and the original contractor, and one firm that scans them for a living warns that accidental cuts risk injury and serious structural failure. So we start with the building's drawings and the existing telecom sleeves, which in most towers were cast in the closet stack for exactly this purpose. If those sleeves have spare capacity, or can be cleared of abandoned cable, no new hole is needed at all.
When a new penetration truly is required, the location is marked from the drawings, the slab is scanned with ground-penetrating radar, the result is reviewed with the building's engineer, and only then is a core cut — with the firestop restored afterwards and photographed. In older factory buildings with conventionally reinforced slabs the rules are similar, even if the stakes are lower: scan first, avoid beams and column heads, and agree the spot with whoever is responsible for the structure. The cost of a scan is small next to the cost of a mistake, and a board or landlord can ask to see the scan report before signing off.
Cell signal dies inside our glass-walled tower — can the building's fiber carry an in-building cellular system?
Yes, and it is one of the best reasons to put single-mode strands in a new riser. The energy-saving coatings on modern windows reflect radio as well as heat. One signal-booster supplier lists low-emissivity glass at a loss of 30 to 34 decibels, worse than the figure it gives for six inches of concrete, which is why apartments and offices behind glass walls in Long Island City can show a full signal on the street and almost nothing at the desk. The established fix for a building of any size is a distributed antenna system: signal brought in from a donor antenna or from a carrier's equipment and spread through small antennas on every floor, usually over optical fiber.
The radio design, the carriers' approvals and the head-end equipment belong to a cellular integrator, not to us. What we provide is the part they all depend on: dedicated single-mode strands from the room where the head-end will sit up to each floor's closet, kept separate from the tenants' strands, labelled for the system and tested before the integrator arrives. If the building is at the riser-planning stage, reserving those strands costs very little; adding them years later means another pull through every floor. Our answer to "should we plan for cellular?" in a new glass building is nearly always yes.
Condos, retail units and shared floors
We bought the retail condominium at the base of a residential tower — does the residential board control how our fiber gets in?
Partly, and the condominium documents decide how much. A retail unit at the foot of a tower is usually its own unit with its own owner, but the foundation walls, the main telecom room, the shafts and often the sidewalk-level entrances are common elements or belong to the residential side. If your provider's fiber has to pass through the residential telecom room or cellar to reach you, the board — or, in a new building, the sponsor still running it — has a say over the route, the hours and the insurance. If your unit has its own frontage and can take a carrier entrance directly, the residential side may hardly be involved.
We start by reading the declaration and bylaws with you, or with your attorney, and by walking both sides of the building to see which route is physically available. Often the cleanest answer is a separate entrance conduit into the commercial unit, with its own locked enclosure, so the store is never dependent on access to the residential cellar for a repair. Where the only route runs through shared space, we write the proposal so that the board can approve it as a defined, documented path — sleeve locations, cable type, enclosure, labels — rather than an open-ended favour. That makes a "yes" much easier to get, and much easier to live with when the unit changes tenants.
Can I have fiber run to a home office inside my own Long Island City condo, and what will the board ask for?
Yes. Running fiber inside your own unit is a small job; the paperwork is what takes time. Most condominium buildings require an alteration agreement for anything beyond decorating, and even modest cabling usually falls under it. Expect the managing agent to ask for a written scope of work, the contractor's certificate of insurance naming the condominium and the agent, the working hours you will keep, protection for corridors and elevators, and confirmation that no common element — a riser, a slab, a shaft — will be touched. If the work stays inside your walls and ceilings, approval is normally straightforward.
Technically, the usual design is a short fiber run from the point where your provider's service enters the unit to the room you work in, with small media converters or a switch with fiber ports at each end. That keeps a home office on its own wired connection, unaffected by a wireless network that has to pass through concrete walls. We supply the scope letter, the insurance certificate and a simple drawing for the board package, and we schedule the work within the building's permitted hours. The finished run is tested and documented like any other link, so a future buyer of the unit can see exactly what is in the walls.
We run a coworking floor in a converted Long Island City factory — should each member company get its own strands, or is that just a network-settings job?
For most members, it is a network-settings job; for a few, it is worth separate glass. The Long Island City Partnership was already counting co-working locations in the neighbourhood in 2018, and most of them work the same way: one internet service, one backbone, and members separated by virtual networks configured on the switches. That is perfectly adequate for a design studio or a three-person start-up. Running dedicated fiber to every desk cluster would cost a great deal and add nothing they would notice.
Some members are different. A company that must keep its traffic physically apart for a client contract, a healthcare tenant handling patient records, or a firm that brings its own carrier circuit into the building may need its own strands from the entrance room to its suite, ending in its own locked enclosure. The answer is to design the backbone with that in mind from the start: enough spare strands in each run that a member can be given dedicated glass without another pull, and enclosures with separately locked trays. We draw the floor with you, mark which suites are likely to need physical separation, and build to that — leaving room to change when the member list does.
Water, neighbours and nearby carriers
Water came in around the provider's conduit where it enters our waterfront basement — how is a fiber entrance sealed so it stays dry?
With a proper duct seal at both ends of the conduit, not with a handful of caulk. Where a conduit passes through a foundation wall below grade, groundwater and storm surge can travel along the inside of the pipe and around the cable, then pour out into the basement. On the Hunters Point waterfront this is not a theoretical risk: during Hurricane Sandy, DNAinfo reported a lobby on 51st Avenue under about five feet of water and a neighbouring basement still flooded two days later. A sealed entrance will not stop a flood that overtops the building, but it will stop a conduit from becoming the leak during an ordinary heavy rain.
We fit listed duct plugs designed to seal around one or more cables inside the conduit, seal the outside of the sleeve where it meets the wall, and leave the cable a gentle drip loop before it rises to an enclosure mounted well above the floor. Spare conduits get blank plugs. Where the conduit belongs to the carrier, we coordinate with them rather than modify their plant. Afterwards we test the strands that pass through the entrance, photograph the seal, and record it in the building file so the next contractor knows it is there and why. It is a small piece of work with a large effect on what a basement looks like after a storm.
A tower is going up on the lot next door — should we test our fiber before excavation starts, so any damage can be proven?
Yes, and it is one of the cheapest forms of protection an owner can buy. Adjacent excavation, underpinning and pile driving can move a foundation wall, shift a conduit or crack an entrance seal, and a fiber that has been bent or squeezed often keeps working for a while with a higher loss before it fails outright. Without a record of how it measured beforehand, nobody can say whether the problem was caused by the work next door. With a record, the comparison takes minutes.
Before the neighbour's work starts, we take an OTDR trace and a light-loss reading on every strand that passes near the shared wall or enters the building on that side, and we photograph the entrance, the conduit and the enclosures. The results are dated and handed to you, ready for your attorney or insurer if needed. When the excavation finishes — or immediately if a tenant loses service — we repeat the tests and compare them line by line. Owners on the OneLIC blocks are going to live next to construction for years; a baseline taken once, and repeated at the milestones that matter, keeps those years from turning into an argument about whose cable it was.
There is a data centre a few blocks away — does that make internet service to our Long Island City building faster or cheaper?
Not by itself. Being near carrier-dense buildings means there is likely to be fiber in the streets around you, but what matters for your price and your installation date is whether your own building is already connected to a given provider's network — "on-net", in the trade's language — or whether that provider must build a new lateral into it. An industry directory lists a data-centre building at 23-10 43rd Avenue with Zayo and Lumen shown in the building; a company two blocks away may still be quoted months of construction if no lateral reaches its own address.
What an owner can control is the inside half of the problem. A building with a clean entrance room, empty conduit to the street, a riser with room to spare and an owner backbone to every floor is cheaper and faster for any carrier to light, because the provider only has to reach the entrance room. We cannot build the street lateral — that is carrier and franchise work — but we can make sure that the moment a provider says "we can serve you", the building is ready to receive the service the same week rather than waiting on an internal pull nobody planned.
