7 Best practices for copper cable installation

Best practice in cable installation is a professional with the proper tools and certifications to ensure the proper installation of the network cabling. Many businesses aren’t willing to pay for this level of service. Often it falls on the IT department to install or supervise moves, adds, and changes to the network by unqualified personnel.

The trade-off in time and possible lost product is a business judgment exercised by management and is a reality of every network.

Still, quality testing and following a few simple rules will result in a network link or repair that can provide years of high-speed network performance.

1. Know your job. Is this a repair of a failed network link or a whole new cable run? Where is the cable going? Is it just a short hop up and over the equipment rack to the next one? Or is it a couple hundred feet up a rise and across the plenum ceiling to a medical room? Careful here –there are no Etherpolice, but there is a fire marshal who doesn’t care anything about how much work it was to install a cable –it better have the right fire rating on the jacket. It is expensive and time consuming to remove thousands of feet of cable because a non-smoke-/flame-resistant cable was used.
2. The cable must have the proper jacket material for the job. There are many types of jacket materials: Plenum, PVC, UV-resistant, mold-resistant, low temperature, to name a few. Use the proper jacket for the job at hand.
   

   Cable being stripped.

3. The cable will have to be cut to length, the ends stripped off of the outer jacket material, and the connectors attached. The cable may very likely be pulled directly off the reel orspool into position through conduit, onto a cable tray or hung on J-hooks.
4. All cable should be laid in as smoothly as possible, without damage to the jacket.
5. When going around corners, a smooth radius should be maintained in accordance with the cable manufacturers’ specification. Remember that an Ethernet copper cable holds four twisted pairs of wire. A kink or sharp bend will affect the relationship of the twisted pairs, allowing electrical noise or crosstalk into the communication signals.

Copper cable installation: 8 guidelines to protect your hardware

You can invest in the best cable and hardware, but if they’re not installed properly, they won’t work, or at least they won’t work well. Protect your investment and follow these installation guidelines.

1. Cable pair twists. This is the most important guideline you can follow for twisted-pair cable. The pair twists are responsible for much of cable’s performance. If you lose the twists, you lose performance.

When terminating CAT5e or higher, maintain pair twists to within 13 mm (0.5 in.) from the point of termination. And remove as little of the sheath as possible.

When terminating cable, only strip back the cable sheath 1″. Keep pair untwists to a maximum of 0.5″.

2. Bend radius. If you bend twisted-pair cable too much, you loosen the twists, and yes, lose performance. The following bend radii are under no-load conditions:

• UTP horizontal: 4 times the cable diameter.
• Sc/UTP horizontal: 8 times the cable diameter.
• Multipair backbone: 10 times the cable diameter.

3. Tension. To avoid stretching, pulling tension should not exceed 110 N (25 lb./ft. or 110N). Pulling too hard untwists the pairs, which can cause transmission problems, and can affect cable certification. Use supports and trays in cable runs to minimize sagging, which pulls on the pairs and degrades performance.

4. Cinching. Take care not to cinch cable bundles tightly, which causes stress and degrades performance. Tie cable bundles loosely. And never staple cables.

5. Connecting hardware. Use connecting hardware of the same category or higher. The transmission of your components will always be the lowest category in the link. So, if you’re using CAT6 cable, use CAT6 connectors.

6. Miscellaneous considerations. Visually inspect the cable for proper terminations, bend radius, tension, nicks, etc. Don’t uncoil UTP cable on a spool. It can cause kinks. Rotate the spool instead. Plan for 12 inches of slack cable behind wall outlets for possible future reterminations.

4 easy ways to a greener network

Data centers consume a great deal of power, so one of the most effective things you can do to reduce your data center’s costs is to increase its energy efficiency. Building and certifying a green data center can be well worth it if you’re embarking upon new construction, but most of us are working with existing networks and are looking for ways to make existing networks more energy efficient. Fortunately, there are ways to make your data network greener with minimal disruptions to its operation.

1. Look for Energy-Efficient Ethernet (EEE) devices.
When you add new equipment, look for Ethernet devices that meet the 802.3az Energy-Efficient Ethernet standard. This new standard can reduce power consumption by 50% or more by scaling down power during periods of low data activity. These new energy-efficient switches, NICs, and routers are totally backwards compatible with older equipment, so they work seamlessly.

2. Take advantage of remote power management.
Remote power managers are devices that enable you to remotely power down unused equipment over your network—for instance, internal company servers during nights and weekends—saving both the power used to run the equipment and the associated cooling costs. Set the power manager to automatically shut down and restart at pre-set intervals or power down manually; either way you save energy.

Most remote power managers also monitor power consumption, alert you when circuit breakers are tripped, and enable you to reboot network devices, making them an invaluable addition to a network manager’s arsenal.

8 Advantages to choosing fiber over copper cable

Fiber optic cable is one of the fastest-growing transmission mediums for both new cabling installations and upgrades, including backbone, horizontal, and even desktop applications. Fiber offers a number of advantages over copper.

1. Greater bandwidth

Fiber provides far greater bandwidth than copper and has standardized performance up to 10 Gbps. While not currently a standard, these speeds could become a reality in future proposals and ratifications. Keep in mind that fiber speeds are dependent on the type of cable used. Single-mode cable offers far greater distance than either 62.5- or 50-micron multimode cable. In addition, fiber optic cable can carry more information with greater fidelity than copper wire. That’s why telephone and CATV companies are converting to fiber.

2. Low attenuation and greater distance

Because the fiber optic signal is made of light, very little signal loss occurs during transmission, and data can move at higher speeds and greater distances. Fiber does not have the 100-meter (9328-ft.) distance limitation of unshielded twisted pair copper (without a booster). Fiber distances can range from 300 meters (984.2 ft.) to 40 kilometers (24.8 mi.), depending on the style of cable, wavelength, and network. Because fiber signals need less boosting than copper ones do, the cable performs better.

3. Security

Your data is safe with fiber cable. It doesn’t radiate signals and is extremely difficult to tap. If the cable is tapped, it’s very easy to monitor because the cable leaks light, causing the entire system to fail. If an attempt is made to break the physical security of your fiber system, you’ll know it.

Fiber networks also enable you to put all your electronics and hardware in one central location, instead of having wiring closets with equipment throughout the building.

Certify fiber optic cable like a champ

If you’re accustomed to certifying copper cable, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to certify fiber optic cable because it’s immune to electrical interference. You only need to check a few measurements.

Attenuation (or decibel loss)—Measured in decibels/kilometer (dB/km), this is the decrease of signal strength as it travels through the fiber cable. Generally, attenuation problems are more common on multimode fiber optic cables.

Return loss—This is the amount of light reflected from the far end of the cable back to the source. The lower the number, the better. For example, a reading of -60 decibels is better than -20 decibels. Like attenuation, return loss is usually greater with multimode cable.

Graded refractive index—This measures how the light is sent down the fiber. This is commonly measured at wavelengths of 850 and 1300 nanometers. Compared to other operating frequencies, these two ranges yield the lowest intrinsic power loss (NOTE: This is valid for multimode fiber only.)

Propagation delay—This is the time it takes a signal to travel from one point to another over a transmission channel.

Optical time-domain reflectometry (OTDR)—This enables you to isolate cable faults by transmitting high-frequency pulses onto a cable and examining their reflections along the cable. With OTDR, you can also determine the length of a fiber optic cable because the OTDR value includes the distance the optic signal travels.