Facts About Structured Cabling

With the merging of data and voice cabling requirements, today’s infrastructures have improved over what was available even ten years ago. Now you can find data, voice, and video cabling lines that also provide communication service for cable TV, security, conferencing, and CCTV applications. But that is not all that has changed. Look at structural cabling.

Infrastructures

A building’s cabling infrastructure for telecommunications is the structured cabling system. For example, the United Kingdom prefers balance twisted cables in unshielded or shielded pairs with a bandwidth of 200MHz. That means each cable used for communication uses four twisted pairs with two network points. To construct the whole, the infrastructure consists of many smaller subsystems. This can include horizontal cabling to connect rooms for telecommunications, backbone cabling that supports other cabling structures throughout the whole business, and telecommunications rooms that connect the horizontal and backbone cables.

Standards

The installation and design of all structural cabling systems are regulated by laws and standards for voice and data communications. This requires modular sockets and either a category 5 or 6 cable. These are often referred to as Cat5e or Cat6. The standards specify how the cable should be laid in such a way that a star formation results with outlets terminating at a specified central panel in the server room.

Switches

Outlets allow data network switches to run from the patch panel and to create either a voice port or a data port. Color coding plays an important part in the identification of connection ports specifying voice or data terminals, although the standards do not require the color coding. Data cabling currently being used must be connected with no “doubling up” for the use of both data and voice in a single line.

Structural cabling can be seen as the glue of the network services. You can configure your cabling needs to find your business requirements, whether ISDN, WAN, LAN, or any other voice or data service.