Campuses add a dimension single buildings never face: outside plant. Inter-building duct banks, campus fiber rings, shared entrance facilities, manholes and handholes, infrastructure that lives between buildings and therefore between responsibilities. Facilities owns the buildings, IT owns the network, and the conduit under the parking lot belongs to whoever last needed it.
Campus infrastructure decisions also compound. A carrier entrance built for one building becomes the de facto feed for four. A duct bank sized in 1998 becomes the constraint on every project since. Without documentation and governance at the campus level, every new building, amenity, or technology project rediscovers the same unknowns at engineering rates.
GDS governs campuses as systems: documented outside plant, controlled access to shared spaces, change management that understands inter-building dependencies, and coordination between corporate IT, facilities, and the carriers and vendors who serve them.
Where this property type gets hurt
- Undocumented duct banks, manholes, and inter-building fiber
- Ambiguous ownership between IT, facilities, and real estate
- Carrier entrance and pathway constraints discovered mid-project
- Campus-wide DAS and emergency communications coordination
- Vendor access spanning multiple buildings with inconsistent control