Structured Cabling New Installations
We plan, install, terminate and test using quality cabling components for a wide range of commercial and industrial network infrastructure with full warranty at better rates.
We understand that today’s companies house a large number of diverse bandwidth-intensive devices, including bladed servers, clustered storage systems, virtualisations appliances and back up devices-all interconnected by networking equipment. These devices require physical cabling with an increasing demand for higher performance and flexibility, all of which require a reliable, scalable and manageable cabling infrastructure.
Our process takes in general the following stages:
- Planning the cabling infrastructure.
- Selecting cabling components.
- Implementing the cabling and testing cables.
- Building a cable routing framework for equipment racks.
- Managing the cabling infrastructure.
Prices by Quote
APCOMS Services
Data cabling installation
Data cabling certifying
Data cabling terminating
Commercial network fit-outs
Office networks, wireless/Wi-Fi
Industrial network cabling
Rack install
Copper cabling Cat6 / Cat6a
Network Faults / Maintenance / Updates
75% of faults are fixed within the first hour
Data cabinets can be easily forgotten about and neglected. Left alone in their store rooms or comms cupboards to gather dust and mess! Different contractors and I.T. Staff come and go and before you know it, your data cabinet is so untidy that moving a patch lead or trying to add services becomes a nightmare!
Problems you may have;
– Data cables not labelled correctly
– Patch leads crushed into cable management
– No cable management
– Network switches hidden behind a patch lead mess
– Fibre patch leads in danger of getting broken
– No space behind your rack to work on installing network gear
– Limited space for cable management because you’ve slowly removed it all to fit more cables in! We’ve seen it all!
Ideas:
– Upgrade the data cabinet – get more space in there!
– Upgrade cable management to allow more space to tidy patch leads
– Re-organise your comms room to allow more space around the rack
– Label all of your patch panels with large clear and professional traffolyte labels
– Replace untidy patch leads with correct lengths for ease of use
– Have backbone cabling records and drawings made up to show where every fibre, phone and copper link goes to!
Warranty!
All our jobs are guaranteed!! As you can see on our website; we work with well-known companies that trust us with our high standards and practices required by Telstra and NBN. All technicians are registered and fully licensed.
Do it Right, the first time!!
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Do you need help with structured cabling?
Contact us today – our technicians are ready to help you solve that problem.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Installing modems and phone lines at the office, warehouses or shopping centres; things are more complicated than a data cabling at home. You might need a specific cabling system, connecting multiple computers, printers or phones which is not an easy task, so is better to hire an expert. Although, you should know which are the basics of a network and data cabling system (Structured cabling) in order to know how to select the best option for you and your business.
Before calling a networking cabling company; it is important to know what your needs are.
- Consider how your employees will work.
- How many employees you have and which ones need to be connected to each other.
- The Cabling company will establish the design of the structure of the communications system; defining the type of work will take place in your office and the layout of the building taking into consideration if you plan to grow the business in the future.
Hardware
Computers and phones are the heart of any business nowadays. How your employees will use them is going to establish the cabling structure. Think if you need to conduct video calls or your employees will rely only on audio calls. Who needs to use the printer and how is also important. The actual type of work and how the data is sent between different users can determine the bandwidth. When you are telling your networking company what are your needs, you have to be as specific as possible, so the specialists can create the best system for your needs.
Maintenance costs
After establishing your needs, you need to look for a company which can offer you maintenance services. Setting up a cabling network is not enough. When something will break down, you need assistance to make it functional again. Many cabling companies offer very competitive prices for installation of the system, but no maintenance services or very expensive ones. Comparing both the installation and maintenance costs is important in choosing the right structured cabling company.
Training
When the cabling system is being installed, you should be paying attention or receive training from the specialists. Knowing the basics about the system is going to help you a lot on the long term. Color coding the cabling system is going to come in handy when you need to check the phone cables, for example. A numbering system might also help you fix other minor issues, like checking the connection to a specific piece of hardware. These small things can go a long way, because they help you solve minor problems with the cabling system on the spot, without having to wait for the maintenance team to show up. If you have an in-house IT person or team, it might be a good decision to involve them in the process of installing the cabling system, so they can do small repair and maintenance tasks.
A structured cabling system (SCS) is a set of cabling and connectivity products that integrates the voice, data, video, and various management systems of a building (such as safety alarms, security access, energy systems, etc.) over a choice of media. This media could be shielded or unshielded Twisted pair (STP/UTP) in copper, single mode (SM) or multi-mode (MM) in fibre cables. Structured Cabling system is the foundation and the basic requirement on which all other network equipment depends.
An SCS consists of an open architecture, standardized media and layout, standard connection interfaces, adherence to international standards, and total system design and installation. Other than the structured cabling system, voice, data, video, and building management systems have nothing in common except similar transmission characteristics (analogue or digital data signals) and delivery methods (conduit, cable tray, raceway, etc.) that support and protect the cabling investment.
This means that the equipment from various vendors is connected through a cabling system that uses common standards in choice of media, connectors and topology. The following are the main standards for Structured Cabling:
- ISO/IEC 11801: Standards on Generic Cabling for Customer Premises
- EIA/TIA 568: Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling Standard
- EIA/TIA 569: Commercial Building Standard for Telecommunications Pathways and Spaces
- TIA/EIA 606: Administration standard for Telecommunications Infrastructure of Commercial Buildings (Labeling, Color Coding)
- TIA/EIA 607: Commercial Building Grounding and Bonding requirements for the Telecommunication Industry.
Today’s cabling plant has to support “tomorrow’s requirement”. Changes and upgrades have to be easy and flexible. Often Structured Cabling is neglected but it is mission critical where change control is a must. Structured Cabling systems don’t break but they often get out of control because of the negligence. When we look at the IT Investment, cabling will be around 5 per cent and we expect it to last for the next 15 to 20 years and support all the future applications.
Since applications are dependent on the quality of the network, one recommends the deployment of Structured Cabling as a system that is procured from a leader in the industry with vast experience in the connector and cable market with reliable and good quality products. Deployed as an end-to-end solution, it should ensure consistency in performance and delivery of bandwidth to meet tomorrows convergence networks requirements. While working with a network installer one must ensure that he is vendor certified/trained engineer and offers an effective network solution that is easy to implement and support. While many vendors offer a variety of warranties today, ensure that your network is not just certified for components but also for performance.
TYPES OF CABLES
Optical Fibre: An important characteristic of fibre optics is refraction. Refraction is the characteristic of a material to either pass or reflect light. When light passes through a medium, it “bends” as it passes from one medium to the other. Fibre-Optics use light pulses to transmit information down the fibre and the light pulses move easily down the fibre-optic line because of a principle known as total internal reflection. “This principle of total internal reflection states that when the angle of incidence exceeds a critical value, light cannot get out of the glass; instead, the light bounces back in ” When this principle is applied to the construction of the fibre-optic strand, it is possible to transmit information down fibre lines in the form of light pulses.
There are generally five elements that make up the construction of a fibre-optic strand, or cable: the optic core, optic cladding, a buffer material, a strength material and the outer jacket. The optic core is the light carrying element at the centre of the optical fibre. It is commonly made from a combination of silica and Germania. Surrounding the core is the optic cladding made of pure silica. It is this combination that makes the principle of total internal reflection possible. The difference in materials used in the making of the core and the cladding creates an extremely reflective surface at the point in which they interface. Light pulses entering the fibre core reflect off the core/cladding interface and thus remain within the core as they move down the line.
Single Mode: Single-mode cable accepts only one mode of light – the axial mode and supports best at 1310 and 1500 nanometre wavelength. The single-mode cables are the most important cables for long-haul use (carrier and Internet core). The cable has a small core (8 to 10 microns) that forces the light to follow a more linear single path down the cable, as opposed to the multipath reflections of multimode cable. This cable has the highest bandwidths and distance ratings.
The core diameter for single-mode cable is typically 8 to 10 microns with a cladding diameter of 125 microns.
Multimode: Multimode cable accepts many modes of light and supports best at 850 and 1300 nanometre wavelength. This cable has a relatively large diameter core (50 to 100 microns) and a total diameter of 125 microns. Step-index multimode cable has an abrupt change between core and cladding while graded-index multimode cables have a gradual change between core and cladding. For example, the minimum recommended cable type for FDDI (Fibre Distributed Data Interface) is 62.5/125-micron multimode fibre-optic cable. That means the core is 62.5 microns and the core with surrounding cladding is a total of 125 microns.The core specifications for step-index and graded-index multimode cables are typically 50 and 62.5, whereas the cladding diameter for step-mode cable is 125 microns. Within multimode there are four varieties (OM1, OM2, OM3 and OM4), which is the most popular in the enterprise Networks, an OM1 (62.5 micron), OM2 (50 micron) fibres are becoming obsolete in the industry because of the large bandwidth requirements, where its replaced with OM3 and OM4 (50 micron Laser Optimized Fibres) which could support high Effective Modal Bandwidth of 2000 and 4700 MHz-km respectively and these fibres would also support for the upcoming 40/100G requirements. But this fix still has distance limitations.
Twisted Pair: Twisted pair cable consists of a pair of insulated wires twisted together. It is a cable type used for telecommunication purpose. Cable twisting helps to reduce noise pickup from outside sources and crosstalk on multi-pair cables. Twisted pair cable is good for transferring balanced differential signals. The advantages of improved signal-to-noise ratio, crosstalk, and ground bounce that balanced signal transmission bring in wide bandwidth. By transmitting signals along with a 180 degree out-of-phase complement, emissions and ground currents are theoretically canceled. This eases the requirements on the ground and shield compared to single ended transmission and results in improved EMI performance.
Shielded TP: Cables with a shield are called shielded twisted pair and have copper media, commonly abbreviated STP. The degree of reduction in noise interference is determined specifically by the number of turns per foot. Increasing the number of turns per foot reduces the noise interference. To further improve noise rejection, a foil or wire braid “shield” is woven around the twisted pairs. This shield can be woven around individual pairs or around a multi-pair conductor (several pairs).
Unshielded TP: Cables without a shield are called Unshielded twisted pair and is the Copper media, which is being used for increasingly higher data rates, and is the de facto standard for horizontal wiring. UTP is a very flexible, low cost media, and can be used for either voice or data communications. Its greatest disadvantage is the limited bandwidth, which restricts long distance transmission with low error rates.
A Twisted Pair is a pair of copper wires, twisted together and wrapped with a plastic coating. The twisting increases the electrical noise immunity, and reduces the bit error rate (BER) of the data transmission.
Intelligent Cabling Systems: Intelligent cabling system is a solution which will provide complete up to date accurate documentation in real-time by which enabling customers to minimize costly network failures and downtimes, integrates network layer and physical layer management, features integration into facility management tools, reduce staff workload, and more importantly reduce the time for moves, adds and changes by automating the management of the physical layer.
The benefits from intelligent cabling systems are:
- Minimize the Network down time
- By improving the process of moves, adds and changes, reduces the cost associated.
- Guarantees the documentation accuracy
- Improves the response time
- Online tool for troubleshooting
- Mobility – Remote working over the internet
- Improves the performance and Service levels
- Remote management
- Asset Utilization
- Security – Identify unauthorized changes and immediate notification of alarms
Point-to-point network cabling refers to the direct connection between devices such as the switch to the server, the server to the storage, the server to other servers, etc. This cabling method is low-delay and other benefits, but because of its high cost and maintenance costs, it is only applied in some special areas of the data centre. Currently, with data centre constantly developing to high-density, high-speed and large-scale, structured cabling has gradually become the mainstream of data centre cabling. So clearly understanding the structure cabling is significant for taking good care of small or large network systems.
What is structured cabling?
The structured cabling system is a telecommunications cabling system that supports any user-selected voice, data, and graphics application. The system should be able to support voice, graphics, images, data multimedia, security monitoring, and sensing as well as other information. It mainly consists of six subsystems in the following table:
Subsystem name
Building Group
It is a cabling system that connects data communication signals of multiple buildings to a whole. It interconnects the fibre optic cable with the outdoor cables (overhead cables or underground ducts cables or buried cables). It is a part of the structured cabling system, support to provide the hardware needed for communication between buildings.
Equipment Room
This subsystem comprises of cables, connecting jumper frame, related support hardware, lightning protection devices and other devices in the equipment room. It is the central unit of entire cabling system, so its layout, modelling, and environmental conditions, would have a direct impact on the normal operation of information systems and maintenance as well as the flexibility of use in the future.
Vertical Trunk
It is usually from the master equipment room to the management room of each layer, especially the public system equipment in the central point to provide a number of line facilities, using a large number of cable feeders or optical cables, both ends are respectively terminated in the fibre jumper frames of equipment room and management room, the purpose is to achieve the connections between computer equipment, program-controlled switches, control centres and each management subsystem, is the routing of building trunk cable.
Management Install line management devices and various common devices to accomplish the centralized management of the whole system. It is a bridge between the trunk subsystem and the horizontal subsystem and provides the conditions for the same layer networking.
Horizontal Subsystem
This subsystem is arranged on the same floor, one end is connected to the information outlet, and the other end is connected to the jumper frame. Its function is to extend the lines of trunk subsystem to the users working area, lead the user work area to the management subsystem, and to provide users with an international-standard export of information that meets the demands for voice and high-speed data transmission.
Workspace Subsystem
This subsystem is an area that extends from an information outlet to a terminal device. Mainly include the information socket, connecting cord, adapter, computer, network dispenser, telephone, alarm probe, camera, and monitor, audio, and other equipment.
Standards of structured cabling
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the Electronic Industry Alliance (EIA), the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the International Electro technical Commission (IEC), the European Electro technical Standardization Committee (CENELEC) got involved in making the standard of structured cabling along with other organizations, these standards determine the performance and technical standards of the related components of the various cabling system configurations, good for building a structured cabling system with compatibility, openness, flexibility, reliability, sophistication and economy.
The transmission medium of structured cabling
In the structured cabling system, the transmission medium of vertical trunk subsystem and the horizontal subsystem could be optical cable or copper cable. The two kinds of transmission mediums are explained in details below.
Fibre optic cable as a new transmission medium is widely welcomed by the vertical trunk subsystem cabling with its high bandwidth and long transmission distance. More than that, compared with the copper cabling with similar structure, optical cable cabling has the higher network flexibility.
Copper cable is generally used in horizontal subsystem cabling and work area subsystem cabling. In addition, since the ports of the copper cable connector can also be compatible with the ports of the switch and other devices, it can also be used for equipment room subsystem cabling. Copper cables are rarely used in vertical trunk subsystem cabling because they have a transmission distance of only 100m and the distance between devices in a vertical trunk subsystem is usually longer than 100m.
Should I apply structured cabling for my network?
Having said so much about the basics of structured cabling, you might ask: is the structured cabling really suitable for all applications? In fact, the selection of cabling methods should depend on the specific circumstances and the effect that you want to achieve in the end. Structured cabling and point-to-point cabling are widely used in Ethernet cabling, both of which have advantages and disadvantages. In short, point-to-point cabling is suitable for the data centre with less equipment and the simple network environment; and structured cabling is open and flexible, no matter how the equipment and the location of each subsystem changes, we need to change nothing but only the position of fibre patch cables; It can fully adapt to the development of communications and computer networks, and laid a solid base of lines for the future office automation.
Conclusion
This post mainly introduces the major points of structured cabling and compares the advantages and disadvantages of structured cabling and point-to-point cabling, which has a certain reference for users to make a right choice between structured cabling and point-to-point cabling. Besides, to practically build a solid, high-performance structured cabling system, it’s strongly necessary to select a reliable and cost-effective optical network solution provider for offering you a set of high-quality fibre optic product.
