What's the going rate for LAN wiring?

$5,000

$4500 to $7500 if it's certified.

Adair

Where?

N. California: San Francisco bay area.

FBt

"Certified", as in "we've tweaked the drivers and it's now transferring xx Mbits/sec"?

Thanks, FBt

Are you kidding me! A couple of Grad students, some pizza and beer and it's done!

And/or vacuum... :) Might not be a bad idea for overall "office health" even if you don't run new wires.

rick jones

While I agree, the fiberglas insulation above the ceiling tiles is "fluffy" side up. I don't think attacking that surface with a vacuum will be fun or productive...

and then it will need to be done right. there is more to cabling then actually pulling the cable. you have to make sure to not pull it to hard, kink it etc. then there is proper termination techniques at both the patch panel and jack. And if you really want to know that the stuff is going to work as designed, the $10k tester to certify the cable.

Adair

Hardly, see

for a description. Our Fluke DTX-1800 with fiber modules was about $15k. It's important to have your drops certified if you want to know for a fact that no matter what type of equipment you plug in will work to the designed speed. Cables kinked or inproperly terminated can cause your entire network to work at a much slower speed than designed.

Adair

No. Certified as in the cable job meets the spec for Cat5e or Cat6 or whatever you contracted. Just using CatXX components doesn't mean the network is at CatXX network.

David

Ummm...no. Certified means the cable has been tested with a $8,000 cable tester. An install done by experienced installers should almost always pass a certification test.

And then deal with fines from the gov't of Kalifornia for failing to do it to code.

Can't be anymore shoddy then the work I've seen by LOTS of "professionals".

"Bob F." hath wroth:

Ummm... Do you have something against professional wiring?

This was done by PacBell/SBC/AT&T installers:

and was undone by me:

Ok, so I didn't round off the corners and I kludges in some plastic cable clamps instead of the metal loops. I just happen to be working on a bid to clean up and equally messy office phone room that was done by PacBell/SBC/AT&T. I see $$$$$$$ in a professional mess.

Of course, these days, everything is going wireless:

which is quite an improvement.

How wiring is done in other countries. Consider yourself lucky:

The sad part is you can put together a very shoddy looking network that passes certification.

David

If it passes certification, the installation part is good to go... but trying to maintain a shoddy install is very time consuming.

Velcro (tm) is your friend.

And a good cable tag machine.

In comp.dcom.lans.ethernet DLR wrote in part:

Or a neat one that does not!

Messy is good for minimizing crosstalk. Bad for changes.

-- Robert

DLR hath wroth:

certification.

The bigger the mess, the better it works, to a point.

There are a few wiring installations that do not require moving things around, such as for server farms and structured wiring between patch panels. However, I run into far more "dynamic" installations, where the topology, hardware, and even the company, changes every few months. I had one (former) customer that would engage in regularly scheduled reorganizations, which required substantial topology and location changes to the network and servers. When we were done, there were no ty-wraps, clamps, cable ties, lacing cords (or accurate documentation) in the various wiring closets. There was no way to do it neatly, although we did try. At another large company, there was a large Visio plot on the wall in IT titled "Network of the Week". It really did change every week.

Personally, I prefer loose wiring so that I can make changes easily. Much as I would like to nail everything down, it just doesn't seem to stay that way, so why bother?

As for a cable certifier, I would love to own and use one. However, I can't afford it for my smaller customers and my larger (former) customers wouldn't pay for gigabit certification. So, I use a continuity tester which catches most of the gross errors. Not great, but good enough. When I have a troubleshooting issue, I use a TDR and/or SNMP managed switch to monitor framing errors (the usual manifestation of crappy wiring).