Cabling Your New Office Advice I was approached this week by someone wanting to know what to consider when buying data cabling for their new office so I thought a few pointers might be helpful to other people as well. Here goes… 1. First agree the layout of desks and offices, then try to allocate the number of data cables needed at each location, generally the minimum would be two per user (one for computer and one for phone) but depends on the user. 2. Allow data outlets for printers and other devices, (meeting room booking, access control, CCTV, WAP etc). 3. Consider allowing a few spare data cables, especially at the far ends of the routes as changes after the install are considerably more expensive than during. 4. Consider how these data outlets should be presented: 5. Next decide if you need Cat5e, Cat6 or Cat6a cabling. An excellent guide on this was submitted by Clive in a previous blog. 6. Then decide on which manufacturer’s product you require, 7. You should now know the number of data outlets required and the type of cabling required. 8. Each data cable can be no more than 90 metres from end to end. That means that the floor plan of the new office needs to take this into account. If the office is 80 metres from one end to the other, then the comms room can be anywhere on the floor plan. However, if cable routes are more than this then the comms room needs to be somewhere centrally to reduce the cable route length. 9. If you are occupying more than one floor and the footprint is small then you could cable two floors from one comms room on one of the floors providing length is within limits. 10. If you have more than one floor and the footprint is big, then you will need a satellite comms room on all floors except one, which will need a main comms room. Satellite comms rooms will house cabling and network kit only, whereas the main comms room will have all the servers and core switches also. 11. Let us now consider the data cable terminations: 12. Data cables are terminated onto panels which cater for 24 cables and take up a space of 1U in a cabinet or frame. Generally cabinets are 42U high, so you might think you can put 42 data panels in one cabinet. This is not the case. The general rule is to allow for a management panel for every 2 data patch panels. This gives a maximum of 28 data panels (672 cables) per cabinet but patching can be a bit tight. 13. One way to increase this is to use angled data panels which direct the patching to either side of the rack and do away with the need to have as much horizontal management, but increases the need to have wider vertical management on either side of the cabinet for the increased patch cords. 14. If you have more than one comms room then there is a need to connect them together with backbone cables, which can be a combination of copper, fibre or voice cabling. In some instances, where higher security is necessary, then diverse routing of these cables can also be considered. I won’t go into more detail on this here. 15. If you have more than one cabinet within a comms room then you may also need links between the cabinets: 16. Lastly one gentle reminder – If you are connecting to the internet or having new telephone lines in the new premises, be sure to order these early as delays here could impede your moving date!
and terminated on RJ45 plugs at the network switch end, these are formed and plugged into the network switch permanently so that the switch ports appear on a panel within the cabling rack.
