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Voice and Data Cabling
Plexus Installations: Voice and Data Cabling Specialists
At the heart of any good telephony and IT solution is a well structured, properly installed cabling system. A good cabling system will provide the backbone of your business, ensuring that file sharing, voice calls and internet use are all achieved at the highest speed and quality that your equipment can provide.
Plexus Installations stringently follow installation and testing guidelines so that we can provide any customer, whether a single outlet installation or a complete network infrastructure overhaul, with outstanding performance, reliability, manageability and the potential for growth.
Plexus will assess your current cabling network and collaborate with them to design, install, commission and maintain a new or updated cabling system that suits your requirements and budget, remaining easy to manage with the flexibility and capacity to adapt to future needs and technologies. With the extensive information collected from our site survey and years of technical experience, we will find and select the cheapest and best solution for your cabling needs.
What you should expect from a good cabling system:
✓ A good cabling system should be EASY TO MANAGE
The end product of a cabling installation should be neat and orderly, so that simple tasks such as relocating a phone or computer won’t require a service call out. Modern installations can make it as simple as just swapping two patch leads on the patch panel.
✓ A good cabling system should be STRUCTURED to ALLOW FOR POTENTIAL GROWTH
Requirements will of course change from business to business, but it’s always important to keep an eye to the future. Can you see your company growing and adding say, five to ten employees over the next few years? Or are you looking to eventually downsize your business to increase profitability? These factors need to be taken into consideration when designing your cabling solution.
Decisions affected by potential growth include what type of cable you choose to run your points with, how many points you want, how many patch panels you want to buy and the size of your cabinet to house equipment.
✓ Most importantly a good cabling system should be SAFE
.IMPORTANT: Be very careful of UNREGISTERED cablers!!! All cablers must be qualified and registered to legally install any cables in a home or office type situation.
A common issue faced by businesses and company owners all across Australia is unqualified people installing cabling systems.
It's easy when a new building goes up to assume that the electrician on the job is also qualified and knowledgeable on how to run and install phone and data cabling systems. However, that is not the case. More often than not electricians don’t actually have an ACMA license, which is extremely important.
Costs of improper cabling to your business:
The end product of an improper installation can be glaringly obvious, yet it can also often go undetected. While a dodgy installation may remain undetected, the performance of your network and business can be greatly compromised;
As mentioned earlier, cabling essentially acts as the backbone of your network as it transfers, downloads and uploads all data packets across its wires to other equipment. If you have high performance switches, routers and computers running off cables that are poorly installed, the equipment will not run at its optimum level.
Once a problem is detected, it will cost you time and money to fix. As cabling work is typically done while the building is at frame stage of construction, to re-run these cables is by no means an easy job. It can wind up costing you double or even triple what you originally wanted to spend on your cabling solution.
If you have good quality equipment, there are some signs that could indicate faulty cabling:
- Constant buzzing or humming sounds in the background of a phone call
- Cross talk
- Slow internet connection
- Slow download and upload rates
- Bad quality of service in VoIP calls
- Any intermittant issues with your equipment
- What are the different cable types? And why does it matter?
Just like any technology, the technology in the cabling world is ever increasing. Over the past 20 years, we have gone from CAT 3 to CAT 4 to CAT 5, CAT 5e to CAT 6, CAT 6a to CAT 6 shielded UTP and now we’re at CAT 7 and work is being done to develop an even better cable! Forget about anything before CAT 5e, you will only deal with and it’s only worth dealing with cable from there-on forward.
With each advance in technology, cables become faster and more efficient at doing their job. Their job of course is to deliver a “data packet” (any download or upload) at a high speed and efficiency. So an Ethernet cable is essentially a courier service, except it relies on bandwidth and data rates to deliver its packages. Bandwidth is just like the road that the courier drives on. The more lanes there are, or the higher the bandwidth is, the more traffic that can occupy that road at any given time. The higher speed limit (data rate), the faster our package can travel on each lane. So, in order to have a fast moving, efficient courier you need high bandwidth, coupled with a speedy data-rate.
For a site survey and quote please contact Plexus on 1300 302 276
