When enterprise locations are spread over two or more nearby buildings, it calls for external cabling.

Internal cabling takes care of intra-building needs, and can be across various floors (vertical cabling) or floor-wise (horizontal cabling).

Map Requirements to Technologies: Costs can be optimized, without compromising on the performance, by opting for different levels and types of technologies.

For example, it’s better to install a fiber-optic backbone to interconnect the buildings. Additionally, there can be some coupling with multi-paired copper telephone cables for the connection of buildings with the public telephone network and the provision of internal lines/services between buildings.

Internal Cabling Needs Special Attention: Internal cabling should be designed in such a way that it’s able to meet present as well as future needs. This is because the internal cabling is much more complex than external cabling and an improper plan can make a future expansion a big nightmare. In other words, the infrastructure should be fully extendable, especially in terms of technologies.

Ensure Robustness: Robustness of a structured cabling solution should be high on the buyer’s priority. That comes from the solution’s ability to facilitate smooth and uninterrupted heterogeneous traffic while ensuring high network uptime.

’Cause You Can’t Dig It Every Year…   Life to cost ratio: The cabling infrastructure is expected to last far longer than software or hardware. A good cabling infrastructure will therefore need to reflect a lot of vision regarding future applications and yet be cost effective

Look at Fiber’s No-interference Advantage: Fiber is completely future proof. It remains unaffected by EMI and RFI effects. Two core tight-jacketed cables are normally used for these applications. Mostly multimode 62.5u fiber goes in multi-storied buildings as a vertical backbone and 50u laser graded or single-mode fiber goes as a horizontal backbone in the big campus-wide projects.

Make It Future-proof: In years to come, since the gigabit reaches to the desktop, the necessity of 10-gigabit backbones will be a must thing for the bandwidth-hungry applications. With 10-gigabit backbones installed, companies will have the capability to begin providing gigabit Ethernet services to workstations and, eventually, to the desktop in order to support applications such as streaming video, high-end graphics etc. As the speed and bandwidth of the network increases the distance that copper cable can support decreases. If looking at a very long-term plan, it will be a good option to use single-mode fiber since it will be a much superior solution at a relatively much lower cost.

Real-time cabling management could be very effective in the premises networking where different groups use the same backbones and share the same resources. It’s very essential to identify the various groups and provide them the set up and bandwidth accordingly.

For major projects, sophisticated gigabit solutions are also available. Large enterprises may find such solutions more suitable.

It is also important to note that cabling infrastructure is generally considered a 10 year investment as opposed to two or three years for electronics.