| |
| Electronics & Telecom Docs |
IHS sells a full selection of standards documents & collections from the industry's top organizations.
To learn more, and for a free quote, please complete the form below. |
|
Structured Cabling Standards Get Restructured
 The industry standards for specifying structured cabling systems are getting a facelift. In November, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) published TIA-568-C.3, Optical Fiber Cabling Components Standard, one of four standards that make up the standards suite known as the TIA-568 series, which offers guidance on cabling for buildings. It is expected that updated versions of the other three documents will be released in the near future.
What makes the updated documents noteworthy isn’t necessarily the information being added to or deleted from them; rather, it’s the change in how the standards address the unique needs of the various types of buildings that use structured cabling.
Originally developed for commercial buildings, the three documents that made up the first TIA-568 suite quickly became the primary standard for wiring buildings—so much so that they were being used for much more than general commercial buildings, such as warehouses, schools, hospitals, airports and residences. And as users adapted the standards for their projects, they began requesting documents that would address the requirements of various types of structures beyond commercial buildings.
As the document versions proliferated, maintaining them became problematic.
“What we were finding was that a lot of information was being duplicated,” says Henry Franc, chair of TR-42.1, the subcommittee that maintains the commercial building and premises portions of the TIA-568 series of documents. “For example, the horizontal cabling distance out to a work outlet is 100 meters. It’s the same 100 meters in residential or industrial or commercial or healthcare or educational facilities, but we were repeating that data all over the place. And then as technology changed, we had different application tables that provided information such as how far can you go with Ethernet in the backbone or FDDI or fiber channel and things of that nature, and we found that we had to update the same information when we made changes in three, four, five or six documents, and it became very confusing from the reader’s standpoint. Which set of application tables was correct?”
With the latest suite of documents, known as the C series, the committee has implemented a new strategy. The TR-42 family of standards now will be organized into three primary areas:
-
Common standards (including generic guidelines, pathways and spaces, and administrative information)
-
Premises standards (for structures such as commercial buildings, data centers and industrial facilities)
-
Component standards (providing information on twisted pair copper and fiber optics)
Following this new system, fundamental—and generic—cabling information is being provided through three documents:
-
TIA-568-C.0 will provide guidelines on basic cabling practices and methods that can be applied to any type of building.
-
TIA-568-C.2 will specify requirements for copper cabling components.
-
TIA-568-C.3, which was released in November, specifies requirements for optical fiber cabling.
Specific premises requirements will be addressed in separate documents, such as TIA-568-C.1, which will provide guidelines for commercial buildings. Another document with a similar scope is the soon-to-be-published TIA-1005, which will offer guidance for industrial buildings.
The revised TIA-568 series will do a better job of supporting specific needs, says Franc. Take healthcare facilities, for example.
“The most important thing when the standards were written back in the 90s and even more recently was the performance of the telecommunications network. But with healthcare, the central focus isn’t delivering telecommunications services, it’s delivering clinical services. So where these standards were originally written to optimize the performance of the telecommunications network and make it as efficient as possible from a resource standpoint, that’s not necessarily the same driving focus for healthcare facilities. From the user’s perspective the priority is no longer just network performance but optimizing the ability to service and provide medical care to people.”
Franc goes on to explain, “For example, in the commercial building document, they talk about the idea of redundancy being optional. They don’t mandate having a redundancy or diversity plan. Whereas with a healthcare building, you don’t want to say, ‘Sorry, my data network is down. I can’t get you the X-rays or lab results to deliver your medical services. You have to plan for and accommodate the unexpected.’ Therefore, things like redundancy, diversity and backup plans are no longer optional as they may be in a commercial premise.”
A number of premise-specific documents are expected to be developed or rewritten by the committee, including those focused on commercial, industrial and healthcare buildings, as well as customer-owned outside plants (buildings on a campus). The committee is also working on a revised pathways and spaces document, which will specify pathways used for the installation of telecommunications media and the areas or spaces where media is terminated and telecommunications equipment is installed
|