Your company has acquired a new place in town or expanding. It is clear that the company must either strengthen or change the existing cabling.
A cabling system underpins your critical mission applications. It greatly affects the performance of your network; it makes the network perform very low or high. Consequently affecting your business; employees taking too long to transfer and download files and such problems. However, you have little knowledge in cabling coupled with zero experience in the same. You cannot assess your cabling, right! Then how can you do this? The answer is simple; hire a cabling company or a professional network cable installer to perform a comprehensive assessment of the cabling system.
The network cabling company you select must be experienced and knowledgeable in networking and installation and testing of cabling. An impeccable track record; look at the portfolio of their clients and testimonials. Find if they are certified. This will ensure that you get high quality work.
What does cabling analysis entail?
The first task is to inspect your existing cabling and test them. The inspection looks at whether the cables are outdated, mismatched or poorly installed; these issues can be spotted through direct physical observation of the cables.
Then conduct tests on cables. Testing of cables need to be done with the high quality testing equipment to help you know the cabling system capacity and bandwidth. Ensure the company or professional cable installers you entrust the assignment with have best testing equipment. A proper test will reveal the following:
· Whether the cables comply with standards such as ANSI/TIA/EIA. ANSI/TIA/EIA is a standard designed to support manufacturing, installation and testing of cables.
· The capacity and bandwidth of the cables.
· The electrical characteristics of the cable and whether the cabling is affected by other electrical devices.
While testing of cabling system is successfully completed, the company helps you decide whether to upgrade the existing cabling or install a new one. For instance, if your decision is to install a new cabling system. There are some considerations you cannot make alone but with the help of an expert because they have huge impact on your network performance.
Key considerations before installing cable
Look for abandoned cables. The fire rated cable in the ceiling when heated may cause fire while also releasing toxic substances that are dangerous to employees’ health and safety. Why put yourself and employees at risk? Remove those abandoned cables.
Know options for cabling available
Although there are many categories of cables offered by networking vendors such as fiber, cat6, cat6a and cat5e, the size of your business will determine which bandwidth is needed. Cables in the category of cat5e are good for small businesses and you can easily upgrade them to a higher bandwidth.
Cat6 cables are good when you are planning to expand the business in future and can handle Gigabit Ethernet. Fiber cabling is suitable for high speed data transmission over longer distances. Moreover, ensure that the cable system you choose is designed by a recognized cable manufacturing brand and installed by an experienced cabling company.