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Cabling Infrastructure

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by titus.ablorh 2 views

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My question is how often does one have to revamp his cabling infrastructure. Running an infrastructure for 8 years. Do you think its time to do some revamping. I am on CAT5n with 10/100 Nortel Bay switches. Are there any norms out there for such issues?
I will welcome any advices.

12 replies

by fnugry

If your switches support media and data error sensing/counting, then a high rate of data errors will be the first indication that your cabling needs some refreshment.

In any case, I believe the best solution is to invite a technician from the company that wired your office at least once a year to test the infrastructure. Usually, they will have all the necessary equipment and skills for it.

by titus.ablorh

I am planning to invite a specialised company to do that but I really want to know what the normal practices are and how often.

by thechas

Inspect the jacketing, and a few connectors.

If the jacketing is starting to break down, or the fingers on the connectors are corroding, you should begin to plan for a rebuild.

If the jackets and connector fingers look okay, there should be noneed to replace anything.

Chas

by titus.ablorh

I have more than 1500 data connection points (and double that for power outlets) in the building and I have seen some of the jacketing physically breaking down for which I will invite someone to fix that. What I am really looking for is if there are any norms on practices on how often to revamp your cabling system. The CAT5 cables have a lifetime warranty but can we rely on that or revamp at periodic intervals (if so how often?)

by simpsonite

I go into a lot of different environments all of the time, I have seen cabling that has needed replacement in only 3 years, and I have seen cabling that is just fine after 10 years, there are no hard and fast rules, it is different for every environment, because every environment is different. I usually tell my customers that if they are planning on upgrading their switching backbone, or there are physical signs of cable breakdown, replace the cabling - regardless of age. In your case, I would replace the cabling.

by iland

You have a lot of possibilities to work with. How many nodes are running at 10 meg and how many at 100? Are you experiencing data traffic bottlenecks? What sort of budget do you have in mind? What sort of server side backbone is in place at the moment? Sometimes performance latency is experienced at the drive level during reads/writes. Can you offload apps to spread the workload over multiple servers?

If your not having any major performance issues and cost is a factor, then simply repair what needs to be repaired, the least amount of impact on your production enviroment is always an issue.

If you have the budget capability then a overhaul never hurts...hardware cost has dropped and product life cycles have increased. Planning and deployment would take some work and as you know, IT personel never have anything better to do then play video games and crack software!

by gigelul

Our network was warranted by the installer for 15 years. The network is 4 year old and I don?t have any problem in this time with cabling system.

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