Greetings,
I've spent a lot of time today looking into the proper way to extend a T1 circuit past the smartjack left by the telco but am left with a few questions. Before that, here's my situation:
There are 4 new T1 lines on smartjacks in the building telco closet. The routers that need to be plugged into the smartjacks are roughly 70 ft. away in a different area. Currently there are several cat5e runs between the two locations carrying ethernet and voice lines. These are currently somewhat messy and I wouldn't mind replacing them with a many pair cable. In the end, what I really need is 4 T1's, 4 100Mbit ethernet's, and 12 voice lines connecting the telco closet to my closet elsewhere. I'm in search of the best way to do it.
What I've come up with so far is that the *right* way to extend the T1's is via individually shielded twisted pair. What I don't see anyone talking about is where to buy it, or how to terminate and ground it. It also seems like LOTS of people are using cat5 for short runs (like mine) to do the same thing but keeping the tx and rx pairs in separate runs. Most of the people doing this seem to be of the mind to give it a shot and see if it works. Not having testing equipment or the knowledge of how to use it this seems like a bad plan in my situation.
What I'd really like to do (I think) is rip out all the old stuff and run some kind of 50 pair cable between the two locations with amphenol (or similar) connectors on each end that go into 110 blocks, or patch panels ... or both. I'm not sure if everything will play nice in one bundle though and it seems there are mixed feelings on this strategy in the newsgroups.
I guess my bottom line questions are what is normal practice in this situation, how likely is my plan to fail, and how would you do it differently?
Many thanks, Brad Hill