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Office wiring

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frl

Technical User
Jul 28, 2003
102
US
First let me say I am a wiring newbie. Here is our situation.
We have two floors in our building.2nd and 3rd floor. Now we will rent also the ground floor. 1st floor will still remain with other company. We have a Wiring closet in the 2nd floor, with two 24-port Cisco switches.What is the best way to connect ground floor to our network?
Should we place another wiring closet and a switch on ground floor and connect the switches from ground floor and second floor? Any advice is welcome.
 
That is exactly what I would do. I would extend your backbone fiber to the ground floor and set up a new closet for your Cat?? Cables. There is a distance of limitations on your cables to your devices (290 feet) I believe, and that would keep you within those guidelines. That will make it easy to trace down problems being that your cabling will be in a separate closet.

Mike Jones
LSUHSC
 
Mike is correct however, The size of the building is a determining factor. It is always best to dedicate a Telecom. Room per floor with Copper and Fiber Backbone back to the Telecom. Equipment Room. In the event you sublet any part of the building you can disconnect the backbone and not worry about security. If it is not in your budget to buildout dedicated T.R.s on each floor and you do not exceed the 290' cable distance you can get away with home running all locations to your 2nd floor TER. If you are running a 10MB network going just over the 290' distance should not create much problems. (Maybe a few more collisions) Hope this helps.
 
I would not homerun cables from the ground floor to 2nd. This is a bad design choice. Do it right the first time and it will not come back to bite you in the butt later.
 
FYI...
I am pretty sure that the distance for Ethernet is 100 meters (330 feet).
As stated above, I would never recommend home running cables between floors for networking. If you look at the TIA/EIA wiring standards, I believe they specify wiring closets on each floor, and distributed out on each floor if required to keep horizontal runs under 100 meters.
 
I would have a closet on each fllor. Will save you headaches in the long run..
 
I would have a closet on each floor. Will save you headaches in the long run..
 
Thanks for your reply. I will install a wiring closet on the new floor. What is best for connecting the closets together, for backbone. Fiber?
 
Fiber would be your best choise. You could use copper, but a long with copper comes limitations that fiber doesn't have. I would think that multimode would be fine.

Mike Jones
LSUHSC
 
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