Cabling – ah yes, that gathering of wires under desks, behind TVs and games consoles. Do you remember those fancy cable tidy things that we ordered from the stationery catalogue as we believed they would keep all our cables nice and tidy – god, they were awful and thankfully short-lived. Cabling in the modern workplace is so much more with the advancement of technology and connectivity.
Structured cabling is the cabling and associated hardware needed to provide comprehensive infrastructure serving a wide range of uses within telecoms and data transmission throughout the computer networking environment. Industry standard installations of LAN, MANs and WANs, typically follow installations within certain areas: Entrance Facility, Backbone Cabling, Equipment Room, Horizontal Cabling, Telecoms Room & the Work Area.
Facilities, IT & Infrastructure Teams work tirelessly to ensure us at the endpoint have the right support to access our tools/applications, but the investment, standards and accreditations within this area are vast and constantly changing.
We do take those little patch cables/RJ45 fly leads for granted, not realising the scrutiny they have been through to pass the standards globally.
I just wanted to highlight the backbone cabling standards adopted from North America in 1991 – ANSI (American National Standards Institute) and TIA (Telecommunications Industry Association) – ANSI/TIA-568 set of cabling standards. Here are the standards for structured cabling:
ANSI/TIA-568-C.0 (2009) Generic Telecommunications Cabling for Customer Premises
ANSI/TIA-568-C.1 (2009) Commercial Building Telecommunications Standard
ANSI/TIA-568-C.2 (2009) Balanced Twisted-Pair Telecommunications Cabling and Component Standard
ANSI/TIA-568-C.3 (2009) Optical Fibre Cabling Components
I might be telling you something you already know, but for me when I read the plethora of technical specs on backbone cabling offered by Panduit and implemented by INS Group , I appreciate the complexity of providing world class cabling services. Simply WOW!
If you are looking for some guidance on your point to point or structured cabling, come chat with us and the amazing global partners we deal with. The wealth of knowledge is amazing!
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