Structured Cabling

• A Long-Term Investment
• The Foundation Of Your Information Technology Strategy

The use of timely, accurate information is a key requirement for any successful business today. The caliber and performance of your Information Systems and the networks they run on can mean the difference between success and failure in today's competitive business environment. What is often overlooked, however, is the critically important role that your cabling system plays in supporting your Information Technology systems.

Your cabling infrastructure typically accounts for a small portion of your total IT systems and networking investment, yet an improperly designed and installed cabling system can be the cause of chronic network problems that may prevent you from ever realizing the truepotential of your IT strategies.

Moreover, the negative impact of an inadequate cabling infrastructure will only become more evident as you add new applications, more users and faster networking speeds throughout your business, both today and in the years to come. Now is the time to develop and implement an effective structured cabling plan into your overall IT systems and networking strategy.

What is Structured Cabling

Structured cabling is a "standards" based method of engineering and installing an integrated data, voice and video cabling system for your business. A properly designed and installed structured cabling system provides you with a cabling infrastructure that delivers predictable performance as well as flexibility to accommodate growth and change over an extended period of time. Additionally, a structured cabling system provides a uniform, open physical cabling topology that can simultaneously support multiple logical networking topologies for different networking applications such as Ethernet and VoIP. Your initial investment in a "standards" based structured cabling system will return many benefits including an extended operational lifespan, predictable performance, manageability and growth. These benefits bring increased efficiency, improved productivity and reduced costs to you and to your business.

What are "Standards" and Why are they Important?

Domestic and international standards organizations havebeen formed to ensure that manufactured products meet certain quality, safety and performance "norms" for that category and class of product. Standards organizations such as ISO/IEC,TIA,CENELEC and CSA have created and published standards for structured cabling products and systems, and their specifications for Category 6, Category 5e, and Category 5 copper systems as well as optical fiber systems are widely accepted and used throughout the industry today.

Just as technology continually advances, so do the standards that are created to characterize and compartmentalize technologies into coherent and manageable segments. Early standards, including Category 3 and Category 4 specifications are effectively obsolete in today's technology environment. The Category 5 standard, originally introduced in the early 90's to address the increased performance demands of data networking remains in use today, albeit for installed-base and legacy networks. Category 5e, or Enhanced Category 5, was developed in the late 90's to extend the performance characteristics of the earlier Category 5 specifications to meet the higher performance demands of more sophisticated emerging technologies such as Gigabit Ethernet. Today, Category 5e specifications are acknowledged as the minimum requirement for data applications and the recommended choice for voice applications in new cabling system installations. In June 2002, driven by ever-accelerating advances in technology, TIA published their 'next generation' performance standard for copper cabling systems. Referred to as Category 6, this new standard set new thresholds for cabling system performance in the gigabit and multi-gigabit networking era, specifying performance and capacity that effectively doubles that of Category 5e.

The ever-accelerating evolution of networking technologies,fueled by the increasing bandwidth demands of converging voice, data, video and imaging applications and driven by the users' insatiable need for higher speeds and faster response times will inevitably result in the need for higher performance structured cabling systems. For end-users, the challenge will be in selecting a structured cabling system that will meet both current and future needs. Whether those needs indicate the use of Category 5e, Category 6, optical fiber systems, or some combination of these, end-users should look for systems that not only meet but exceed the specifications of each respective standard, thereby providing additional performance margins to accommodate the evolution of ever more demanding networking needs. End-users should look to a manufacturer with a proven track record in the area of standards compliance who is prepared to offer systems with performance guarantees that go beyond the minimums currently defined for each category of system. Communication Networks Australia offer a range of high performance products from a list of proven manufacturers who back up their products with up to a 20 year warranty.

For more information please contact our friendly Communication Executives who will be more than happy to assist you.