WiredScore Certification Guide: Connectivity for Class A Offices

For most of the last two decades, "connectivity" was treated by developers the way "lighting" was treated in the 1970s — a back-of-house line item, handled by whichever ISP happened to own the riser. WiredScore was created to change that. It is now the global standard that decides whether a Class A office is genuinely a Class A office.

What Is WiredScore?

WiredScore is a global certification system that rates the digital connectivity of buildings. It was founded in 2013 in New York City by Arie Barendrecht and a small group of co-founders, with backing from then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration. The original problem WiredScore was created to solve was specific and narrow: New York office tenants had no transparent way to compare buildings on connectivity, the way they could compare them on rent, floor plate, or HVAC. WiredScore gave that comparison a structure.

Over the following decade, WiredScore expanded out of Manhattan into the rest of the United States, then into EMEA and APAC. Today it certifies buildings across more than 35 countries. In the Middle East and India, it has gone from a curiosity in 2018 to the assumed default for new Grade A office stock in 2026. ICD Brookfield Place in Dubai, KAFD's premium towers in Riyadh, the major DIFC towers, and Mubadala HQ all carry WiredScore certification. So do JLL's global headquarters, Goldman Sachs's offices, and the majority of Google's office portfolio worldwide.

WiredScore Office is the scheme used for commercial workplaces. There is also a separate scheme — WiredScore Home — for residential and serviced-apartment developments. And there is a sister product, SmartScore, run by the same body, which assesses smart-building operations rather than connectivity infrastructure. We will return to the WiredScore-vs-SmartScore distinction later, because it is one of the most common sources of confusion.

The Five Certification Tiers

WiredScore Office uses five tiers. Unlike LEED's four-level point system or BREEAM's percentage bands, WiredScore tiers map fairly cleanly to building class and tenant expectation.

Certified represents a credible baseline — the building has at least the connectivity infrastructure that a modern tenant should reasonably expect. Silver is typical of well-specified Class B+ stock. Gold is the most common rating for proper Class A office. Platinum is the working ceiling for most trophy assets in major business districts; it requires fully redundant ISP paths, comprehensive in-building cellular, generous riser capacity, and demonstrably resilient design. Platinum Pioneer is reserved for projects that exceed Platinum on innovation criteria — a small fraction of certified buildings worldwide.

For most Gulf and Indian developers building new Class A office today, the right target is Gold or Platinum. Going below Gold rarely justifies the cost of certification. Going above Platinum requires innovation that is hard to justify outside of flagship projects.

The Six Assessment Categories

WiredScore Office assesses buildings across six categories. They are deliberately practical — the assessor is looking at infrastructure decisions and operational arrangements, not aspirational documentation.

Each category contributes to the overall tier. Unlike BREEAM's weighted percentages or LEED's flat points, WiredScore uses a more prescriptive structure — there are minimum thresholds in each category that gate the higher tiers. You cannot reach Platinum on the strength of one category alone. A building with extraordinary ISP choice but a single riser will not pass Platinum, no matter how many carriers it advertises.

Resilience and ISP Diversity

Of the six categories, Resilience is the one most commonly underspecified at base-build stage. Resilience is the answer to a simple question: if any single piece of connectivity infrastructure fails, can the building keep its tenants online?

For Platinum, the answer needs to be unambiguously yes. That typically means:

• Two physically separate ISP entries into the building, ideally from different street directions, with no shared trench or shared duct between them
• Two physically separate vertical risers serving every floor, with the equipment rooms diverse enough that a single fire, flood or contractor-strike incident cannot take both out
• Diverse equipment rooms on separate fire compartments and ideally separate power feeds with independent UPS
• Redundant active equipment in the meet-me room and on each tenant's connection

Most of these decisions are made at the telecoms RFP stage, before the lead ISP has even been signed. Once the lead ISP is contracted to a single physical entry path, retrofitting diversity gets expensive. This is why ISG advises clients to engage WiredScore thinking before the telecoms RFP, not after the building has been designed.

In-Building Cellular and DAS

The Wireless Coverage category is where Gulf assets often surprise their developers. Modern Class A office tenants — and the C-suite executives who tour the building before signing leases — expect their phones to work consistently inside the building, not just near windows. Glass curtain walls with high solar performance coatings tend to attenuate cellular signal sharply. Concrete cores attenuate it further. Without an in-building cellular Distributed Antenna System (DAS), most trophy office buildings deliver poor cellular coverage in their core spaces, lift lobbies, and basement areas.

WiredScore Platinum effectively requires a DAS. The assessor will look for:

• Active or passive DAS covering common areas, lift cars, basement levels and tenant floor plates
• Multi-operator support — DAS that carries Etisalat (e&), du, STC, Zain or relevant local operators, not a single carrier
• Signal-strength evidence from a post-installation survey, not modelled predictions alone
• Public WiFi in common areas, lobbies and meeting suites, distinct from tenant tail-circuit WiFi

DAS is one of the categories where Middle East projects sometimes need vendor coordination beyond the typical telecoms scope, because the carrier-neutral DAS market in the region is smaller than it is in North America or Western Europe. ISG works with the developer's preferred DAS integrator early in design to ensure the headend, riser and tenant-floor coverage strategy is documented to a WiredScore-acceptable standard.

WiredScore Home

WiredScore also runs a separate scheme for residential developments, called WiredScore Home. The structure is similar to WiredScore Office — five tiers from Certified through Platinum Pioneer, with a focus on the connectivity that residents actually experience. The categories are adapted: less emphasis on tenant-experience platforms, more emphasis on apartment-level cellular coverage, in-home WiFi readiness, and the resilience of broadband provision to each unit.

WiredScore Home is most relevant for premium residential and serviced apartments — luxury towers in Dubai's Marina or Downtown, premium residential in BKC Mumbai, and high-end serviced apartments in central London. We are increasingly seeing WiredScore Home paired with WELL on luxury residential, where the developer is positioning the building as the holistic premium experience. For more on that pairing, see our comparison guide: WELL vs WiredScore.

The Certification Process

WiredScore certification follows a structured submission process managed through the WiredScore digital platform. The typical sequence:

Stage 1: Registration and Pre-Assessment

The project registers with WiredScore and the WiredScore Accredited Professional (the consultant managing the assessment) conducts a pre-assessment to identify the achievable tier given the design as it stands, the gaps that would need to close to reach a higher tier, and the commercial implications of each gap. This is the right moment to make the Gold-vs-Platinum decision, because the cost of closing each gap is typically lowest at this stage.

Stage 2: Documentation and Submission

The Accredited Professional compiles the evidence package — riser drawings, ISP path diagrams, DAS coverage maps, BMS architecture, tenant handbooks — and submits it through the WiredScore platform. The platform is significantly more structured than LEED Online; it expects evidence in specific formats against specific criteria, and it does not accept generic uploads.

Stage 3: WiredScore Review and Certification

WiredScore's technical team reviews the submission, raises queries, and issues a draft determination. The Accredited Professional addresses any queries, and the final certificate is issued. For new buildings, certification can be claimed at design stage (subject to construction matching the submitted design) and confirmed post-completion. For existing buildings, certification is based on the as-built condition.

Costs

WiredScore certification involves three main cost categories: WiredScore registration and review fees, the Accredited Professional consultancy, and the supporting connectivity engineering work where the design needs strengthening to hit the target tier.

For a typical Gulf Class A office tower targeting Gold or Platinum, total certification cost — covering WiredScore fees, the Accredited Professional consultancy, and supporting engineering — typically runs from approximately $45,000 to $120,000, depending on building scale and complexity. These costs cover certification only; they do not include the cost of the connectivity infrastructure itself, which is part of base building MEP and IT scope.

The much larger cost question is what the connectivity infrastructure costs to deliver. Putting in two physically separate ISP entries, two diverse risers, and a multi-operator DAS adds capital cost relative to a single-path single-riser building without DAS. For most Class A office in the Gulf, the incremental capital cost of Platinum-grade infrastructure is small relative to the total project budget — typically a fraction of a percent — and is more than recovered through tenant rent and dwell-time.

WiredScore vs SmartScore

The single most common confusion we hear from clients is the difference between WiredScore and SmartScore. They are operated by the same body. They can be pursued together. They look superficially similar in their certification platforms. They are not the same thing.

For new Class A office, WiredScore is almost always the right starting point. Connectivity infrastructure is largely irreversible once the building is built — risers cannot easily be added, ISP entries cannot easily be moved, and DAS cannot easily be retrofitted economically. SmartScore, by contrast, is largely a matter of operational systems and integrated data, which can be added or evolved after handover. Pursuing SmartScore on a building that lacks the WiredScore-level infrastructure is building the second floor before the first.

WiredScore in the Gulf and India

WiredScore's growth in the Middle East has been faster than most observers expected. In 2018, Middle East WiredScore certification was a niche curiosity. By 2026, it is the assumed standard for any new Grade A office in DIFC, ADGM, KAFD, or the major Mumbai BKC and Bengaluru tech-corridor towers. The reason is simple: trophy office tenants — the multinational law firms, banks, and consulting firms that anchor these districts — increasingly request WiredScore as part of their site-selection criteria. Once a single tenant in DIFC asks for it, the rest of the market follows.

For UAE and Saudi developers, the question is rarely whether to pursue WiredScore. It is which tier to target, and how to ensure the connectivity infrastructure is designed coherently from RFP onward rather than retrofitted at handover. For Indian developers, the same is increasingly true in BKC, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad, with WiredScore appearing on most new flagship office stock.

The availability of WiredScore Accredited Professionals in the region has improved substantially. ISG holds Accredited Professional credentials and runs WiredScore assessments alongside the design process, not as a separate parallel exercise. Our offices in Abu Dhabi, London, and Mumbai give us close geographic alignment with where most of the work actually sits.

ISG's WiredScore Approach

ISG provides WiredScore consultancy through Accredited Professionals based across our Abu Dhabi, London, and Mumbai offices. We take a single coherent view of the connectivity stack — telecoms strategy, riser design, ISP path diversity, DAS, BMS connectivity readiness, and tenant fit-out documentation — rather than treating WiredScore as a documentation exercise bolted onto the end of design.

Our approach focuses on three areas:

• Pre-RFP advisory — engaging at the telecoms strategy stage, before the lead ISP and DAS partners are signed, when the cost of designing for Platinum is still modest
• Design coordination — running the WiredScore criteria as a design constraint alongside MEP and IT, not as a parallel certification process, so that resilience and capacity decisions get made once
• Submission discipline — preparing the evidence package to the structure WiredScore's platform expects, not the structure that other certification systems use, which speeds up review and reduces query rounds

For projects considering WiredScore alongside WELL, LEED, or other certifications, ISG can advise on the strategic implications of each and help structure the certification stack so that documentation effort is shared rather than duplicated.

Frequently Asked Questions