Patch panel in small business?

I could see where it would be easy to make that assumption if you didn't know the details of why it is bad practice to terminate solid wire in that fashion. It isn't because there is some secret society that wants to do extra work. A long time ago telephone companies etc found that one of the best ways to create an unreliable connection was to terminate a small gauge solid wire on something that moved. They devised the idea of punching down solid wires onto fixed contacts which then could transition to stranded wire either through a connector assembly or on a patch panel. That produces a economical result that is very reliable and tens of millions or more of cables are successfully terminated and used that way.

Also it greatly enhances cable management and looks neat and professional.

Sure, but neither the US or USSR terminated solid wires on movable connect points on their spacecraft.

Less reliable than the punchdown, plug/jack connection, and two stranded wire connections commercially crimped by a known company all added together.

You say less than 24, but not how much less.

-- glen

In my opinion I would give the customer what they want. Some customers know everything and when you run into these types of people you just have to give them what they want as long as it can be legally done. I use to do alot of work for Wal-Mart and some of the store managers did not like jacks then patch cables for the registers. They just wanted one long patch cable from the patch panel in the back of the store to the register. The customer got what they wanted and we saved a jack and a SMB.

- Douglas

You should always let the customer make technical decisions that violate standard practices especially like in this thread where the uninformed owner wants a cheepo job. I think I may have seen some of your work.

If the owner wants a cheepo job and it does not break code then I say give them what they are asking for. It may not look nice to you but it works and the business owner saves some money in the process. I would though make the owner fully understand what the end product will turn out like. And if they continued to want a cheepo job and I was willing to do the work for the amount of money they were willing to spend I would do it.

- Douglas New Millennium Network Services

I will give you my thoughts in somewhat random fashion based on years of dealing with various scenarios.

First let me say that it isn't unheard of for me to do things inexpensively but not cutting corners if I think someone is truly in a situation.

A professional should give good advice. If someone is looking for a cheepo job they are solely concerned about paying less. They aren't technical and any explanation about the pitfalls might as well be in Armenian because they will not understand it. So it really doesn't relieve you of any guilt for doing poor work.

Cheepo jobs will work when you pack up your stuff but what about the future.

Here is a good example. I was working at a new client. All of the network cabling was haybaled with nothing marked and plugs crimped onto solid cable etc. Another company had purchased the facility and hired me evaluate the equipment and to get things in order. My contact offered that the prior owner was a cheapskate but didn't have to be.

I was gingerly running a short patch cable when someone came in and said there was no connectivity from the manufacturing building. The servers were located in the office building.

There was a 6 strand fiber cable coming from the other building. They had stripped the outer sheath and crimped ST connectors on 2 strands and simply tied back the other 4 and drove a big staple into the wall to support the cable. Standard practice would be to terminate all strands onto a fiber patch panel which among other things would allow for spares. The connectors went to a media converter held onto the wall with a cable tie. After troubleshooting I found that one strand was dead. If the spares had been terminated I could have used them. I called a cable company we use and they couldn't get anyone on site until the next day. It turns out that whomever installed the fiber used a cheepo crimp connector which worked loose making a extremely lossy connection.

I doubt the cheepo job covered the cost of lost manufacturing.

The cable guy who came couldn't believe the crappy work especially since it was done by someone who claimed to be professional.

A few weeks before I had a similar experience. I was doing some simple work and the office manager came in and said "what did you do to all of the phones?". I replied that I wasn't doing anything with their phone system. It is a busy office with 20 phone lines. Their phone provider couldn't connect to the system so they did a truck roll. It turned out that someone had made a patch cable using solid wire that was plugged into the smartjack which was intermittent right at the plug taking the T1 down. Just brushing it was enough to make it fail.

So they basically had over a dozen people drinking coffee for most of the day waiting for the phones to come back up. I doubt the cheepo job covered that.

On 13 Oct 2007 10:47:55 -0400, snipped-for-privacy@panix.com (Al Dykes) wrote (with clarity & insight):

I have done plenty of all sorts of connections, and yes, these jacks are a pain.

That's why I wondered about the logic of adding jacks just for the transition - solid cable management has, in my installations, pretty much eliminated floppy stuff.

One thing that has always worked well for me is to conscientiously reduce the number of connections.