What Are the 6 Components You Need to Know?

1. Entrance Facilities

Think of the entrance facility as where external cabling (from service providers or other buildings) enters your premises. It has connections to the internet providers, phone lines, and private networks.

Key aspects on the list include:

• A connection point between external and internal cabling.
• May house network interface devices, grounding, and surge protection.
• Smooth integration of outside services into your building infrastructure.

Without a properly planned entrance facility, your internal systems may be compromised, connectivity may suffer, and security may be at risk.

2. Equipment Room

The equipment room holds critical network equipment, including servers, routers, switches, and storage. While smaller telecom rooms are more isolated, an equipment room is larger and often located centrally to support a single building or campus.

Some key characteristics include:

• Hosts core networking and telecommunication hardware.
• Environmental controls, like cooling, ventilation, and security, are provided.
• It is the distribution point for services throughout the organization.

Equipment rooms are the “nerve centers” for your structured cabling system. How they are organized directly affects the efficiency and reliability of your network.

3. Backbone Cabling (Vertical Cabling)

Backbone or vertical cabling joins various telecommunications rooms, equipment rooms, and entrance facilities anywhere within one building or among several buildings.

Key considerations are:

• Runs vertically between floors or horizontally across buildings.
• Supports high-bandwidth applications.
• Uses fiber optic cables or high-capacity copper cabling.

The backbone is the primary pathway along which large volumes of data flow between significant network domains. An inadequately dimensioned backbone (or vertical pathway) will become a bottleneck and adversely affect scalability.

4. Horizontal Cabling

Horizontal cabling runs from telecom rooms to work areas on the same building floor. “Horizontal” cabling moves usually through ceiling areas, conduits, or under raised flooring to desks, offices, or workstations.

Major aspects include:

• Maximum distance, usually limited to 90 meters.
• It is composed of twisted-pair copper cable or optical fiber.
• Terminated into patch panels in the telecommunication room and outlets at the workstations.

Horizontal cabling supposedly affects the good user experience since it connects end devices- computers, phones, or printers- to the network.

5. Telecommunications Room (TR) or Enclosure

The telecom room (TR) is the nomenclature for the location where the backbone and horizontal cabling systems are interconnected. A building usually has one telecom room per floor.

Some key points to consider include:

• Houses the patch panels and cross-connects, as well as the distribution equipment.
• Will interface the user equipment to the larger network.
• It will help isolate and manage connectivity on a per-floor or section-of-building basis.

Thus, the telecom room will keep cables orderly, accelerate troubleshooting, and allow for necessary modifications.

6. Work Area

The work area allows end users to plug in and access the network through outlet boxes, patch cords, and devices. It serves as the last link of the cabling system.

Some points of concern:

• An outlet includes wall plates and connectors that link devices to wall outlets.
• It must have flexibility to accommodate changes in office layout or user needs.
• It should have high-quality connectors to maintain performance.

Though often overlooked by designers, the work area is part of the system with which employees interact daily. Proper design assures consistent performance and minimum downtime.