What's involved in refreshing AV across a 50-room estate?

Refreshing AV across a 50-room estate is a 6 to 18 month programme built in five phases: audit, standardisation, pilot, phased rollout and decommissioning. Typical budget lands at £8,000 to £25,000 per room averaged across room types, and the natural refresh cycle for commercial AV is 5 to 7 years before display brightness, camera quality, certification status and supportability fall behind what hybrid working now needs.

The five phases:

• Audit (4 to 8 weeks). Inventory every room: existing kit and age profile, certification status against current MTR or Zoom Rooms specs, utilisation data from the booking platform and AV usage logs, sector compliance gaps (data residency, accessibility, fire and security cabling). The audit also captures structural constraints (ceiling voids, power, containment) that will shape standardisation.
• Standardisation (2 to 4 weeks). Define 2 to 3 room standards (huddle, standard meeting room, boardroom, sometimes a fourth for training). Standardise hardware brand per category, control panel layout, ceiling mic spec, network configuration, DSP preset and naming convention. Document as a "room book" the client owns.
• Pilot (4 to 8 weeks). Build one of each room type, run in production for 2 to 4 weeks, surface any issues with spec, cabling, UX or support, then refine the standard before committing to the rest of the rollout. Skipping pilot is the most common reason a 50-room refresh runs over.
• Phased rollout (4 to 12 months). Sequence remaining rooms by floor, building, tenant or department to limit business disruption. A typical pace is 2 to 4 rooms per week per crew. A 50-room estate usually runs at this pace for 25 to 40 weeks depending on access windows.
• Decommissioning and recycling (rolling). Old hardware is recovered, asset-tracked and disposed of under WEEE regulations. Working kit can be redeployed to lower-priority rooms or sold; non-working kit recycled to certified facilities with a destruction certificate for the asset register.

A specialist integrator running project management on a programme of this scale reports against an asset register of every room, with milestone gates between phases so finance can release capex tranche by tranche. The same meeting room AV standards then govern future rooms as the estate grows or refits.

Quick reference: 50-room AV refresh runs 6-18 months, £8k-£25k per room, 5-7 year cycle, audit first then standardise, pilot, phase 2-4 rooms / week, decommission to WEEE.