CABLING
When installing network cabling, the challenge can be
meeting deadline pressures such as minimal installation
time, out of hours working, strict access controls, storage
or sometimes the available skill set to terminate and test
on-site. This applies to copper cabling installations, and even
more so when installing fibre cabling.
Fibre in enterprise installations, and particularly in data
centres, is now a much greater part of network cabling
than it used to be. However, fibre termination in the field
requires additional skill sets, longer termination time, a
clean environment and additional specialist termination
and test equipment requiring an additional, and sometimes
significant, investment over and above what’s used for
copper system termination.
By Andrew Garfield, Director,
xSiCute Ltd
www.xsicute.com
Exploring the benefits of pre-
terminated cable assemblies
including speed and cost
Pre-terminated assemblies
A solution is factory terminated pre-terminated assemblies,
which are growing in popularity and where each cable is
terminated in a controlled environment ensuring optimum
performance before being delivered to the site. This
significantly reduces installation and labour costs by up
to 75% compared to field termination methods. Pre-
terminated solutions are factory tested and typically have
test results that are either supplied with each assembly or
can be accessed online.
An excess of packaging materials is something that
installers have long battled with. Many end-users, and
particularly data centres, have been at the forefront in terms
of ensuring reduced packaging because their environmental
policies are quite rightly designed to reduce packaging
waste and prevent it from being delivered to the site. With
Pre-terminated systems, the waste being delivered to site is
reduced by up to 80% because there’s less packaging and
no termination scrap material or debris to dispose of.
It’s also fair to say that using a pre-terminated system,
or even just an individual pre-terminated fibre cable within
a conventional field terminated system, requires more
forward planning. Knowing in advance what cable lengths
are required for each pre-term location and the connector
or cable type required is vital. When installing copper in an
existing system that’s being added to will almost certainly
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