What is a Structured Cabling System?
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Back in the dawn of the networking age, cabling systems were run through offices in an almost ad hoc fashion. You needed separate cables for your phone systems, separate cables for your computer network, and often times, different cables for different sub networks on a system.
Fortunately, the establishing of robust standards has simplified things a fair bit. Even so, laying out a building’s cabling infrastructure is a challenging technical problem, as more and more systems are working on the basic digital infrastructure of IP networks – from telephony to security systems, safety alarms and energy management systems in green buildings.
Making a structured cabling system is a commitment to an open architecture with standardised layouts and interfaces, and standardised media types. It’s aimed to be future proof and compliant for future upgrades. It’s also estimated that direct, standards based structured cabling systems installations save nearly 30 percent on the construction and infrastructure layout for a modern building; though this will always have some hemming and hawing depending on the local costs of labour.
For buildings that expect to have tenants beyond the owning company, a structured cabling system allows the most flexibility in meeting their needs, including the ability to respond quickly to sudden upgrade requests. Because most green energy management systems require a structured cabling system to get their maximum benefits, there exists the potential that the system can pay for itself in reduced energy costs within a few years of its installation. (The fact that future upgrades will cost less due to standards compliant is another cost factor to consider.)
Even for existing structures, paying for the upfront cost of a structured cabling system can make a significant savings down the road; the amount that can be saved depends largely on how extensive (and easily accessible) the current cabling system is. Particularly, for buildings that have building management systems that are older than 15 years or so; sheer necessity may make the upgrade pay for itself, as the service providers who access things like the fire alarm system or security systems may start charging extra on their contracts for the expense of dealing with legacy hardware.
Additional costs can be cut by routing the traffic through one set of digital cabling systems rather than running multiple cables with different voltages and requirements through the same cable run space. In addition to reducing the cable clutter, they also make the job of physically running the cable out (and replacing it) much simpler, and may help you meet fire code regulations by increasing the dead air space in the cable runs.
No matter what level of system integration you’re aiming for, a structured cabling system should be seriously considered as the foundation for the total work and the sort of job you want accomplished. There will be restrictions based on where you’re set up on what can and cannot be integrated into the system; local regulations may require that fire alarm systems be kept separate, so that a power outage to the networking center doesn’t shut the system down.
Derek Rogers is a freelance writer who writes for a number of UK businesses. For information on Structured Cabling, he recommends Network 24.
