OPINION
Heralding service integration over structured cabling Say hello to BS EN 50173-6 by Mike Gilmore, Director STANDARDS@fia
BS EN 50173-6 is ready to be published - and is the foundation and focus of integrated building infrastructure strategies of the future. Entitled `Generic cabling -
Distributed building services,’ the standard provides cabling infrastructures from comms rooms to outlets enabling the connection of wireless access points, surveillance cameras, door controls and environmental sensors and countless other devices. BS EN 50173-6 uses the cables,
Mike Gilmore of the FIA looks at a draft – and soon-to-be-ratified – new cabling standard…
connecting hardware, links and channels of the other EN 50173 standards to support a wide range of new services - far removed from the IT environment for which they were originally developed. The last twenty years has seen the
progressive unification of IT protocols and cabling specifications so that voice and data are indistinguishable as a common ICT service delivered over a common infrastructure. However, cabling specifications have
developed faster than the growth in user demand. High-end solutions have become data centre-centric and are far beyond those necessary to meet the needs of the vast majority of users - who now consider entry-level fixed cabling overlaid with wireless delivery as being more than capable of meeting the key
business objective of agile working. By comparison, building
management applications have been dominated by incompatible protocols delivered over different, proprietary and incompatible cabling components and channels - the supporters of which have appeared to consider that incompatibility as a virtue rather than a disadvantage.
Voice and data arena Of course, this situation could not last forever, in the same way that it collapsed in the voice and data arena - and the impact of IP-connected devices and the provision of power to those devices using the data cable is leading to an unprecedented growth in the type and range of services capable of being supported by structured cabling and which do not need the provision of mains power supply at the remote device. BS EN 50173-6 is a standard for
the design of the cabling for those new services over the balanced and optical fibre cabling for office cabling, but installed to different parts of the building. It is applicable to all types of
premises - even homes - as an overlay to the conventional IT cabling and has
been produced following many, failed, attempts to develop alternative cabling solutions to meet the objectives of competing building management system solutions. Indeed the comparatively recent
introduction, and the rapid market acceptance, of DC power delivery by IEEE 802.3 (commonly known as Power over Ethernet) has fully justified the decision to use existing components and installed performance limits. So what types of services are
supported by BS EN 50173-6? The answer here is simple - any that
operate over a minimum of Class D cabling infrastructures (i.e. Category 5:2000. Category 5e solutions) and operate within the power provisioning of IEEE standards. Even higher powers than those
dictated by IEEE are possible but demand serious consideration in terms of planning and operation. These trends have consequences
for the traditional office cabling implementation but the primary infrastructure-based design issues are moving from `to the desk’ to `above- ceiling’ architectures to support not only wireless solutions for agile working, but also a wide range of building management solutions such as lighting, surveillance, access and environmental control. The integration of outputs from
these services and the monitoring of the supporting infrastructure using previously unrelated data is enabling new levels of space optimisation and energy management. The financial savings offered by
the application of such techniques are potentially huge compared to any infrastructure-based investments and this has focused renewed interest in automated infrastructure management solutions.
Ethernet: infrastucture of the futre 10 NETCOMMS europe Volume IV Issue 1 2013
Infrastructure challenges However, this level of integration is not without its challenges - a common infrastructure specification should not be confused with a single infrastructure and there are substantial issues, which have to be addressed by building owners and designers.
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