Punch down

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jamesguy10

jamesguy10

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Location
Amsterdam NY
How much an hour would you charge to punch down cat5e cables into patch panels. A guy wants a bunch of these done. Apparantly there is just wires hanging down a wall now. Have to put in a rack and patch panels, test all cables, and trace and label all cables. Im doing this T&M and dont know how much an hour to charge. I dont usually do little jobs like this but i want a new truck so im taking any and all work
 
The insurance company that we just did some office lighting for, said they paid $300 an hour to put patch panels, test all cables, and trace and label all cables.and I only seen one man on the job, manager told me other companies manted more for the testing. you may want to check around a bit, before pricing, these LV guys don't give away their work, like a lot of electricians do.
 
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peter d said:
Hmmm.....in your area, do they even have telephone lines? ;)
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Well, last week good ol Bell Communications came and ran 2 little wires down Jimmy farmers fence and now we gots ourselfs a town phone in Jimmy farmers milkin' house. Edna just took off on the horse to go call her cousin sally. She lives in the big city and gots herself a phone too!
 
jamesguy10 said:
Well, last week good ol Bell Communications came and ran 2 little wires down Jimmy farmers fence and now we gots ourselfs a town phone in Jimmy farmers milkin' house. Edna just took off on the horse to go call her cousin sally. She lives in the big city and gots herself a phone too!
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Not only can you run dialtone down a couple strands of barbed wire, you can also run DSL: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/03/2039218 (Although Paradyne did it first)

"The barbed wire demo dates back to 1995, at the May Interop show in Las Vegas. BroadCom demonstrated 100BASE-T4 operating over barbed wire, using eight strands of wire to conduct the signals for each of four twisted pairs. The set up used 100 meters of category three twisted pair, plus 1 meter of 'bob war'. It was the first demo of 100BASE-T4, and showed the value of using digital adaptive equalization, which was a new thing for Ethernet in those days. It's still cool, none-the-less. At Dominet Systems we once demo'd VDSL running over chains of paper clips."

Ever seen that episode of Quantum Leap where Sam uses the copper gutters of a 1950s radio station as a broadcast antenna? Who needs copper when galvanized steel will cut it? Now where can I order me up some 25-pair barbed wire?
 
Well don't anyone take this wrong, but I can hire any L1 (lowest skilled) BICSI LV contractor outfit in the country to do this for $40 per hour and the trained monkey gets $10 of that. :D
 
eye opener!

eye opener!

satcom said:
The insurance company that we just did some office lighting for, said they paid $300 an hour to put patch panels, test all cables, and trace and label all cables.and I only seen one man on the job, manager told me other companies manted more for the testing. you may want to check around a bit, before pricing, these LV guys don't give away their work, like a lot of electricians do.
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Maybe some electricians need to wake up!!
 
dereckbc said:
Well don't anyone take this wrong, but I can hire any L1 (lowest skilled) BICSI LV contractor outfit in the country to do this for $40 per hour and the trained monkey gets $10 of that. :D
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Anywhere in the country for $40/hr?
I find that a little hard to believe.
 
Rampage_Rick said:
Ever seen that episode of Quantum Leap where Sam uses the copper gutters of a 1950s radio station as a broadcast antenna?
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Clarkson University students did it for real around that same time. This was legendary there, and allegedly was the reason why even 40 years later WNTC was relegated to the cable system & low wattage status... Search on "copper" at this link. Maybe this is where the Quantum Leap episode idea came from?
 
mkoloj said:
Anywhere in the country for $40/hr?
I find that a little hard to believe.
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The $40 an hour guy, I an sure doe's not have a $6,000 certified cable test set, and you can bet his truck, has the best radio shack DIY testers made.

Companies that install, and test and certify cabling systems, know the cost of running a professional cable business.

At $40 an hour the company must have some really nice trucks, once you remove all the dents, and put some paint on them, and it is nice to be able to pick up the employees at the local pub, must really impress the customers, You can't get a pizza delivery kid for $10 in this area.
 
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Why not just charge your normal T&M rate + a premium for any extra costs that you are going to run into?
 
jamesguy10 said:
Im not the $40hour guy. I dont own anything from radioshack. I like Ideal .
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I was going to pipe up about how blinking LEDs does not infer certification, however I just discovered that Ideal does in fact have a digital performance tester.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_cable_certification

I'm a Fluke boy myself, and I've still got an original Fluke 23 DVM that I use nearly every day. For copper certification I've got a DSP-100. Now I want to get one of the DSP-4000s. When I took my Ortronics certification, they showed up with one of those 8-wire continuity testers, and I laughed at them.

All the best tools are yellow, because they trademark the color.
 
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We do cabling work for between $41-$58 depending on customer. We are Bicsi certified and dont have dents in our trucks either. We also own a $6000 Fluke DSP tester. My tech gets $21 plus benifits. This is in Virginia.
 
Rampage_Rick said:
Not only can you run dialtone down a couple strands of barbed wire, you can also run DSL:
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As I recall, it was the '95 Atlanta (not LV) InterOp conference that demonstrated DSL over barbed wire. I built part of that demo setup :grin:. If we'd had access to a lumber yard, there would have been fake "telephone poles" on some of the equipment racks with open wire line between them. This is what happens when network engineers get bored...

Another InterOp show (LV 86?) demo'd 100mbps ethernet over 100km of fiber. IIRC, someone calculated the length to be about 112 ethernet frames long when using standard length interframe gaps.
 
The problem the OP faces is that even if he has the right test equipment, he didn't install the wire, so it may have been badly installed leading to failed certification when it's not his fault. If it's just a "punch and run", if it then fails to work in the customers application, you're still the last pair of hands on the wire.

I'd be very wary of accepting responsibility for installed performance on this job.

A good few years ago when I ordered whole buildings worth of flood Cat5, it came at a fixed price per installed point. When you do enough of them you can determine an average profitable price for a given set of circumsances. Its all swings and roundabouts.
 
DAWGS said:
We do cabling work for between $41-$58 depending on customer. We are Bicsi certified and dont have dents in our trucks either. We also own a $6000 Fluke DSP tester. My tech gets $21 plus benifits. This is in Virginia.
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dont mean to rub you the wrong way but how do you make any money?At $21 hr you pay about $6 FICA,work comp,unemployment that's $27 so you have $14 on the low end and $32 on the high for a benefit package,overhead and profit.
 
Rewire said:
dont mean to rub you the wrong way but how do you make any money?At $21 hr you pay about $6 FICA,work comp,unemployment that's $27 so you have $14 on the low end and $32 on the high for a benefit package,overhead and profit.
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The $41 is low but we only do that for one customer. My guys also get a benefits package, ( medical, IRA, Paid Vacations and holidays, Etc.)and we made a 26% profit on about a million in sales last year. We keep our overhead down. Our burden and overhead is only $14-$15.
 
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