The Importance of Reliable Date Cabling

It is hard to imagine a world without the internet as it is so important in the modern business environment. We cannot stress enough the importance of reliable networking cabling. Some recent studies vindicated our evangelical approach to data cabling:

 

Data cabling typically account for less than 10 percent of the total cost of the network infrastructure.

 

The life span of the typical cabling system is upward of 16 years. Cabling is likely the second most long-lived asset or have. The first is the shell of the building.

 

Nearly 70 percent of all network-related problems are due to poor cabling techniques and cable-component problems.

 

Note: If you have installed the proper category or grade of cable, the majority of cabling problems will usually be related to patch cables, connectors, and termination techniques. The permanent portion of the cable such as the part of the wall will not likely be a problem unless it was damaged during installation.

 

Of course, these were facts that we already knew from our own experience. We have spent countless hours troubleshooting cabling systems that were nonstandard, badly designed, poor documented, and shoddily installed. We have seen much money wasted on the installation of additional cabling and cabling infrastructure support that should have been part of the original installation. No mater how you will think about it, cabling is the foundation of the network and it must be reliable!

 

The best way to ensure that your networking needs are met is by checking that the person installing the data cabling is registered with a cable registrar such as ACRS or one of the other five registrars in Australia. You should also make sure that they have the appropriate experience and qualifications in their background, possibly determining this via recommendations or terminations.

 

Another good thing to do is make sure you get two or three quotes in order to create an accurate idea of pricing, as some installed quote ridiculously high-but others quote too low indicating that they are using inferior quality products. Because the installation has been quoted cheaply, does not mean it’s a good idea. Properly priced instances are more likely to have the quality installation products from good fibre optic cable manufacturers.

 

Besides, installation can often have a warranty, usually between five and twenty years. The better the products, the longer the warranty period as a rule.

 

Costs that result from poorly planned and poorly implemented cabling systems can be staggering. One company that had recently moved into a new office space used the existing cabling, which was supposed to be Cat 5 cables. Almost immediately, 100Mbps Ethernet network users reported intermittent problems. These problems include exceptionally slow access time when reading e-mail, saving documents, and using the sales database. Other users reported that applications running under Windows 98 and Windows NT were locking up, which often caused them to have to reboot their PC.

 

After many months of networking annoyances, the company finally had the cable runs tested. Many cables did not even meet the minimum requirements of a Category 5 installations, and other cabling runs were installed and terminated poorly.

 

Contrary to most peoples thinking, faulty cabling cause the type of intermittent problems that the aforementioned company experienced. In additional to being vulnerable to outside interference from eletric-motors, fluorescent lighting, elevators, cellular phones, copies, and microwave ovens, faulty cabling can cause intermittent problems because of other reasons such as substandard components (patch panel, connectors, and cable) and poor installation techniques. LSZH cables are needed some safety advocates such as the plenum space.

 

Robert Metcalfe helped coin the term drop-rate magnification. Drop-rate magnification describes the high degree of network problems caused by dropping a few packets. Medicare estimates that a 1 percent drop in Ethernet packets can correlate to an 80 percent drop in throughput. Modern network protocols that send multiple packets and expect only a single acknowledgement are especially susceptible to drop rate magnification, as a single dropped packet may cause an entire stream of packets to be retransmitted.