5


“ ”


ICS’s attention to detail and professionalism is second to none, the quality of the workmanship is excellent and the pride taken shows. They take ownership of the whole process and work very closely with Silverstone to ensure nothing is missed or overlooked.


IT Manager Silverstone Circuits Ltd Northampton


SOLUTIONS


The equipment connected to a network and the demands imposed, are fundamental drivers in making structured cabling decisions. A cabling system in its entirety amounts to much more than the sum of its parts: outlets, patch panels, patch cords etc. Alongside considerations such as required resilience, bandwidth, and lifespan of the system, a key decision is the type and standard of cable to be installed. Structured cabling can be broken down into 2 cabling types, these are Copper and Fibre.


Copper


Twisted pair copper cables (4 pair) are available in both unshielded (UTP) and shielded (STP) versions, with UTP being by far the most common. STP is used in noisy electromagnetic interference (EMI) environments, where the shield around each of the wire pairs, plus an overall shield, protects against excessive EMI. A variation of STP, known as ScTP for "screened twisted pair" or FTP for "foil twisted pair," uses only the overall shield and provides more protection than UTP, but not as much as STP.


Due to the attenuation loss of copper cable over distance, an end to end channel length of 100 metres is set by the standards bodies. This channel length comprises of a maximum of 90 metres of fixed physical copper cabling and 10 metres of patch cordage at the workstation and within the patching room.


Fibre


Fibre optic cables are made up of thin filaments of glass that can carry beams of light. Because a fibre-optic cable is light-based, data can be sent through it at the speed of light. Using a laser or LED transmitter that encodes frequency signals into pulses of light, ones and zeros are sent through the cable. The receiving end of the transmission translates the light signals back into data which can be read by a computer.


One of the biggest advantages of fibre cables over copper is that they suffer from almost no data loss and can run for much longer distances without losing data or requiring repeaters or amplifiers. Since fibre cables use light to transmit data and not electrical signals, they are also effectively immune to electromagnetic interference. In office environments, fibre optic cabling is generally used for backbone applications due to the increased bandwidth capabilities.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12