Small office, 12 drops w/4 cables at each drop (one drop has 6) = 50 terminations. False ceiling, no masonry walls. Longest distance from wiring closet: 45 ft.
Above ceiling: dusty, dirty, filthy. Thick clouds of dust ever time a piece of insulation is touched. Certainly a respirator job...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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