wasting cat 5??????

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mattsilkwood

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missouri
ok guys today i ran into a new one. got a call for a small office addition that we did recently. they wanted us to run the cat 5 , that wasnt in our bid so it was t&m. no big deal a total of 3 phone lines and 1 computer per drop, so heres where it gets wierd they wanted 4 cat 5s to each box. i was thinking that they misunderstood the IT guy so i get him on the phone to verify. i asked "you mean 4 pair per box" he answers "4 cables." like i said t&m so thats what they got. almost 4000 ft of cat 5 in an office thats about 1200 sq ft.

have you guys ever run into this or is this IT guy a pair of kleins short of a toolbag?:-?
 
Nope, that's a standard "load" for each port plate in accordance with the latest BICSI standards, the way I read it. Just wrapped up a doctor's office that had just that... 4 cables to each port plate. 2 plates in each of the 7 exam rooms, 6 plates at the nurse's/paperwork station, and 8 plates at the reception area. That's a lot of Cat5.
 
iwire said:
See it all the time.

3 Data, 1 voice to each drop.
Click to expand...

Ditto. My father used to work for a major insurance company... Each cubicle had two workstations, one PC based and one mainframe based. When he plugged in his laptop as well, there you had your 3 data drops all being used at once. Crazy but true.

In another environment I've had a workstation, server, and laptop all at once. Sans a three-way drop (and prior to the advent of WiFi), it was less than ideal.
 
thats crazy ive never seen it before but then again i havent strung any cat 5 in a LONG time. most of what we do is industrial.

thanks for the responses
 
mattsilkwood said:
thats crazy ive never seen it before but then again i havent strung any cat 5 in a LONG time. most of what we do is industrial.

thanks for the responses
Click to expand...
The trick, sometimes, is figuring out which of how many cables they want to go where. The KSU and the data patch panel aren't always in the same closet.
 
When I have a job with a lot of low voltage cables that are similarly sized (not necessarily Cat5), I like to get different jacket colors to help with the confusion. I've developed a jacket color coding scheme to help sort it out. It's semi-standard, among installations that I've been able to work in and around, which is what I based my color coding off of.

Voice - White
Data from patch panel to port plate - Blue
Data from router or switch to patch panel - Pink
Building Automation System, HVAC - Yellow
Building Automation, Riser - Purple
Building Automation, Lighting - Orange
Electronic Access (card key and keypad) - Green
Fire Alarm - red
 
They usually want separate cables to prevent crosstalk. (It can happen). Old fashion station wire or Cat3 is good enough. And, it helps to run a different colored cable. One of our industrial customers insists upon have Cat6, even though their IT guy says it will be along time before they have anything fast enough to require Cat6. T&M!
 
boboelectric said:
Green cable is what we pull for 10 gig.
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If that turns out to be what most 10 gig stuff gets installed as, I might have to modify my own personal coring scheme. It works well, for now. Anything but grey. Look about many ceilings, and it's a sea of grey cables of various sorts.
 
I was wiring a residential basement for a customer. He wanted to run his own phone lines.

He called me up and said he ran the phone lines but wanted me to terminate them.

When I got out there he had run four cat-5 cables to each phone jack. I asked why he ran so many cables and he replied he wanted 4 phone lines.

You should have seen the look on his face when I only used one cable to give him the 4 phone lines. I told him he still has 3 more cables for up to 12 more phone lines. :)

He also ran more cat-5 cables to his computer jacks for his home network.
 
The fun part is when these office spaces get demoed.

I did a "make safe" on a school job last fall that had every style of communication cable above the ceiling from every generation of technology improvement back to the early 1980's. Suffice it to say there way a literal mountain of scrap that came out.
 
If the customer is willing to pay, give 'em what they want.

We did an addition to a high school 2 years ago and had over 300 CAT6 cables pulled. I had to add a couple to the rack this summer and saw that they only have about 60 patched over to the switches.
 
At work they have all of our cubicles in sets of 4. Each set of cubicles have 4 voice and 12 data ports. In our set of because of the computer systems we run we were killing network to the whole set of offices. They dropped us our own gigabyte router to try to keep us off there network as much as possible.

At my desk I use 1 voice, one gigabyte, 4 off our router, and have one sitting there for my lap top. But I have our data sever on the gigabyte, and 4 desktops that I remote desk top all the time with my laptop.

As far as having too many wires at any one point I don?t think that can ever happen. I wish they would have run a set of fiber into the office and run a few gigabyte routers off of them. That way they could optimize the computers that pull off witch data severs.

So any places don?t set up the networks properly o begin with and by the time there done they have a mess of cables and a slow system.

Most of the time it is quicker for me to walk to my desk and pull the needed information of my sever and walk back to the equipment so I can work on a machine.
 
The color codes are not really necessary for the cable jacket - but it does help eliminate confusion. They are more for the port, or "termination feild" - like say the back board for the blocks, racks, or ports. You could have all any color you want in the wall, but the IT guy in India is going to ask if the guy at the desk in Indiana if he is in the blue or red port... :D

See last page of this overview of tia/eia 606.

Numbering/lettering scemes are just as as helpfull and important. If you have worked in a large building where they have been used and maintained they came make life just as easy as color coding can. As most Telco's use this scheme it is a helpfull one to know.
 
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