Why building communication systems are changing from copper to optical fibre.

Welcome to Building Fibre where we take an inquisitive look at how creating a smart, connected world, is impacting the way we design city infrastructure.

Communication Industry speak divides up types of work into sectors with similar requirements such as telecoms or data centres or mobile and a specific sector we call Enterprise. When we talk about Enterprise connectivity we are generally referring to commercial buildings and often the surrounding property. This includes office blocks but also hotels, stadium, airports, hospitals, schools, shopping centres, Colleges, Universities, military establishments and government buildings. The area surrounding properties that form part of the same institution is often called a campus and although a campus is often referred to in relation to maybe educational establishments such as a university, it could equally be a business park, shopping mall or military complex.

The industry standard term for a network installation that serves a relatively small area such as a building is a local area network or LAN. There are also wide area networks or WANs and metropolitan area networks or MANs, but fundamentally they are still just building communication systems that vary in size and are linked together in a designated form.

Each and every one of these buildings has a similar but unique cabling requirement, as we have mentioned before many of these building use a structured cabling system to help manage their complexities.

An alternative to structured cabling is often called conventional or point-to-point cabling. This would be where each system has it’s own dedicated data cabling that doesn’t link together with other systems. Disparate systems may be placed around a building and problems arise when these different systems are unable to connect together and communicate with each other.

A structured cabling system has a main distribution area, or communications room, where all the cables in your structured network, come together and provides the infrastructure necessary to deliver modern communications for a building within a campus in a unified and organized manner.

The infrastructure is required to support systems such as voice, data and multimedia regardless of the service provider. The entire structure is thus connected for voice communication, traditionally telephone but now more than ever using mobiles, the transfer of data to smart devices which used to mean computers but now there’s a whole new range of inclusive devices, the transmission of video pictures whether that’s for surveillance like CCTV or for promotional media and digital signage, point-of-sale terminals, through to smart intelligent devices that measure and survey the environment and want to be connected to everything.

It is known as a structured cabling system because it follows laid down rules of design and consists of several subsystems or smaller structures. The installation of structured cables can meet all the needs of telephone and data communication. At the same time, the system is independent of the equipment that uses the cabling.

Enterprise businesses that need to upgrade or replace existing telecommunications networks are looking for ways to improve energy efficiency and reduce capital and operating expenses. But when it comes to deciding on the technical decisions for upgrades and rewiring, we tend to leave that to the technical guys!

Technology managers are looking for solutions that provide high bandwidth while increasing the security and reliability of their networks and are prone to falling back onto the tried and trusted systems that have previously proved their worth. There is a common saying that ”Nobody’s going to sack you for recommending [insert the leading brand here].