Structured cabling was never as smart as it is now. This is a very good way of defining the path taken by the structured cabling industry at large. This industry is a very good mix of established technologies and emerging ones, and is popularly referred to as Information Transport Systems Industry.
Structured cabling has an army of six soldiers within its ranks. These are Entrance Facilities, Equipment Rooms, Telecommunication Rooms, Backbone Cabling, Horizontal Cabling, and Work-Area Components.
The first three sub systems or soldiers of structured cabling have more or less standard functions. In this, the Entrance Facilities is centered round to where the building in question interfaces with the outside world. Next in line comes the Equipment Rooms. These rooms showcase a plethora of equipment which serves the users inside the building. The third sub system, namely Telecommunication Rooms, is the position where different telecommunications equipment and data are domiciled. These perform the critical job of connecting the 4th and 5th soldiers, in effect the backbone and horizontal cabling sub systems.
This brings us to the all important subjects of Backbone Cabling and Horizontal Cabling. The former which is mostly used in Data centers, transmits the signals between the first three sub systems, namely entrance facilities, equipment rooms, and telecommunications rooms, while the latter makes up the wiring from telecommunications rooms, to single case-by-case outlets on the floor.
The 6th and final soldier of structured cabling is Work Area Components. This particular sub system links the end user equipment to the exits and or outlets of the horizontal cabling system.
Unless one has a strong and well equipped structured cabling infrastructure, the optimum performance of the network cannot be achieved. European countries use a separate set of structured cabling standards, as opposed to the US and some other countries, their primary standard being ISO/IEC 11801.  

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 4:44 pm and is filed under A birds-eye view of structured cabling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.