In commercial buildings, structured cabling and networking refers to the extensive system of hardware, cables, and all the associated equipment that delivers a building’s wireless and telecommunications infrastructure. This infrastructure serves various business uses, including transmitting voice and text data through a computer network and providing telephone services. Quite simply, structured cabling is the backbone of connectivity for commercial buildings, and to ensure optimal performance, efficiency, and scalability, it is essential for commercial building cabling to be professionally managed at the design and implementation stage.
Why Is Structured Cabling Important?
A well-designed and installed structured cabling system in a commercial space provides businesses with a robust, flexible, and (most importantly) reliable infrastructure for wireless connectivity and to transfer voice and data communications. For example, a structured cabling system should ensure fast and consistent connectivity, support high-speed data transfer rates, enable easy troubleshooting, and allow support teams to quickly identify and address issues before they compromise the entire network. Poorly managed cabling design and implementation could lead to intermittent faults that are difficult to diagnose and fix, excessive exposure to heat and moisture, outdated cabling infrastructure, or simply a messy, sprawling design as more cables are added to the overall infrastructure, making the system disorganized and problematic to manage.
Structured Cabling Infrastructure: The Building Blocks Of A Commercial Cabling Network
In most commercial buildings, the structured cabling infrastructure is divided into six smaller modules to make the system more manageable, and these are typically connected throughout a building or campus. Commercial structural cabling normally consists of entrance facilities, backbone cabling, horizontal cabling, work area components, equipment rooms, and telecommunication rooms. Let’s look at each of these in turn.
- Entrance facilities: This is where the public telecoms company network ends, and the wiring at the customer premises begins.
- Equipment rooms: The equipment room is the consolidation point that houses the telecom equipment serving the users inside a building or campus and is the point at which the entrance cabling connects to the internal building’s wiring infrastructure. The equipment room houses patch panels with connections for the backbone cabling, horizontal cabling, and intermediate cabling networks. They may also accommodate network switches, servers, PBXs, MDF’s and other environmentally sensitive devices.
- Backbone cabling: Backbone cabling, or riser cabling, is organized into vertical channels that connect each building floor and includes all your transmission media cables, your main and intermediate cross-connects, IDF’s and the terminations at these locations. This central spinal network connects your entrance facilities, equipment rooms, and telecommunications rooms with work areas on individual floors.
- Horizontal cabling: Horizontal cabling delivers telecoms resources to individual users at their workstations and to AP’s at specified locations and rooms on individual floors, typically running a cable from the user’s device to the nearest telecommunications room on the same floor or in the case of wireless to each AP.
- Telecommunications rooms (enclosures): Telecoms rooms or enclosures are located on each building floor to connect the backbone and horizontal cabling subsystems. Local cables, called patch cords or jumpers, are used on patch panels here to cross-connect various cables within the system.
- Work area components: Individual work areas are the final termination points of a structured cable system and include all components and devices connected to a cable via a connector or jack mounted on a wall outlet.
Find Out More
Investing in a structured cabling system will streamline and simplify the installation of new data and voice communication equipment within your commercial premises and scale your cabling system to accommodate changed business needs. Our professional cabling solutions consider the specific requirements of your building and its occupiers, the safety and quality standards relevant to your jurisdiction, and your business’s unique needs.
To find out more, please contact the expert team at Orion US today by clicking here.
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