Hello, I'm Marcelo Barboza, from Clarity Treinamentos. Welcome to my channel on structured cabling. Today we are going to make a video about structured cabling in small offices or homes.
It is a video about planning the cabling of these locations. This video aims to show how structured cabling would work in a small installation that does not require backbones. First, let's talk about the main materials that are needed in a small cabling.
Patch panel, it can be 24 ports, 48 ports. RJ45 outlet. Four-pair UTP cable, made of solid conductors.
RJ45 patch cord, also UTP, made of flexible conductors. Of course, other materials are needed, such as racks, cable trunking, labels, surface box. But let's focus on the main materials that make up the heart of structured cabling, which are these.
First, the cabling that will serve my users is called "horizontal cabling". All the horizontal cabling starts from patch panels that will stay there in the rack room. As we are talking about a small installation, I will only have one room, which will serve as a rack room, which is the telecommunications room, and which will also serve as an equipment room, because there will be modems, routers and servers.
So this is where we are going to put our patch panel. From this patch panel come the solid UTP cables, maximum 90 meters, connecting each port of the patch panel to an RJ45 outlet like this one, in the same category as the cable and the patch panel. I did not draw RJ45 outlets in all locations, but, yes, all locations, whether the work area, wall mirrors, equipment benches, places for placing wireless access points and cameras must have RJ45 outlets.
One for each cable. Just like each cable will arrive at just one port of the patch panel. It does not matter if the equipment at the end needs one, two, three or four pairs, as this is what will make up structured or generic cabling.
You will understand now. So I’m going to put horizontal cables to serve all my users, all places where there will be voice, data or image points, benches where I will place printers, faxes, multifunction devices, places where I can install wireless access points, cameras, or other equipment that I will install in the cabling. These places are called the work area, where there will be users connecting their equipment there, or coverage areas, which are places where I will place building equipment, such as Wi-Fi access point, CCTV cameras, etc.
The amount of cables that I will install, then, depends on the number of outlets that I will install, which will depend on how many users I have in the office and how many devices I plan to install. On the other side, we will have the network equipment. In the equipment room, I will have another patch panel and I will have proper equipment to handle my voice, image and data networks.
Let's imagine a simple installation. So there must be a switch for the data positions. I will get my phone and internet lines, coming from the building entrance, which can be downstairs or underground.
Telephone lines will arrive at my equipment room, and an the internet line will arrive, which I will connect to the router, usually from the service provider or it can be yours too. From there, the router will interconnect with my data switches. If I have a conventional telephone network, an analog PBX, I will connect the trunk inputs of this PBX to the patch panel, and the extension outputs to a patch panel as well.
Here I designed just a patch panel because adding the input lines, PBX trunks and PBX extensions, it doesn't give more than 24 ports. But I will use as many patch panels as I need to finish all the lines, trunks and branches. This will all be inside the equipment room, except, of course, for the arrival of telephone and internet lines, which will be in their own entrance room, which will be located in some common place in the building.
Inside the equipment room are the rack with these equipment, PBX, router, ethernet switch and patch panel, one or more patch panels for terminating equipment cables. How do I assemble all of this? Well, inside my equipment room I have a rack, where I have that horizontal patch panel, where all the cables will arrive to serve my users, there will be the equipment patch panel, with the arrival of lines, trunks and extensions PBX, and my data switch.
All of this is inside the equipment room. How do I attend then, how do I set up the connection for, for example, a phone, a fax, a computer and a CCTV camera? All of them will be interconnected with patch cords, the telephone, fax, computer, camera, with the outlets that exist at the end of the horizontal cable.
At the other end, I'm going to use patch cords to connect each one to its equipment. Let's start with the phone line. The line arrives and I have to put a patch cord connecting the trunk input of my PBX.
If I have two, three, four lines coming to the trunks, I will have two, three or four patch cords to redirect the entry line to the PBX entry trunk. To connect the phone as an extension, I simply connect a patch cord to the corresponding port on the patch panel with a patch cord to an extension exit port. My fax!
I want to connect my fax directly to an external line, without going through the PBX. So here, on the corresponding port of the patch panel, I put a patch cord connecting the phone line that comes from the entrance, and not from an extension. Data equipment, such as IP CCTV camera, computers, I will connect with patch cords directly to the switch.
This is a very simple and very flexible configuration. The connections in the work areas, coverage area and between patch panels, and between patch panels and switches, are done with patch cords, as we said, flexible conductors, and, for each link, the sum of patch cords, on both sides, it cannot exceed 10 meters. Remembering that the horizontal cable is 90 meters, this means that the channel, from the equipment port to the equipment port at the opposite end, will not exceed 100 meters.
Being 90 meters horizontal in solid cable and 10 meters in patch cords. Let's see what is the advantage of having the link structured in this way. We will proceed to change this configuration.
For example, I swapped the fax that was here now for a printer. So I'm not going to connect this equipment to an external line anymore. I will connect it to the switch.
What I have to do? Remove that patch cord that was here, I will return the slide for you to see, there was a patch cord connecting the line input to the fax port, and now, in orange, the patch cord is removed from this port and placed on the switch port. Okay, I didn't have to touch any equipment, I just removed that patch cord from this port on the patch panel, which came from the phone line, and put it on the switch port.
And now, with the simple change of a patch cord in the rack, I have a new service placed here at the end. Instead of being an external telephone line service, it is now an ethernet, data service. I didn't touch any cables anymore.
Are we going to make a new change in this environment? This time I installed another horizontal cable and placed a phone. Do I need to mess with everything?
No! In the new horizontal cable I just have to install one more patch cord from that corresponding port to an extension port. Okay, I didn't move anything else, I didn't have to install new equipment, I didn't have to work behind the rack, just install the new patch cord at this new point and we have the activation of another extension.
We are going to a slightly more drastic change. I changed. Here I had the phone and here I had the CCTV camera, and I traded them for each other.
Let's go back to the slide. That was the connection, and now it is like this. I changed the equipment.
I connect the new equipment to the nearest ports and outlets, and all I have to do is change the patch cords up here, inside the rack. Which are these in orange. See that the connection was like this before.
This phone is connected to the extension, and this camera is connected to the data port. And now I connected this port in extensions and this switch port, here where the camera is. So I changed the equipment, a data equipment for a telephone equipment, there in the user area, and there, inside the equipment room, all I had to do is change the side of two patch cords.
This then is the advantage of installing structured cabling. This is what makes the cabling structured or generic. I change functions at the ports, I change the equipment, I expand and I have to make very little change inside my equipment room.
I just have to switch, add patch cords to the correct ports. And here we have examples of racks with the patch panels already installed, the equipment also, voice and data, and the patch cords already connected. Note that the patch cords must be connected and must be arranged in such a way that they do not fall in front of the equipment, as it can lead to problems later, both in administration, as in the air flow.
Going back to the slides a little bit, here I showed just how it is the logical connection of all this, but the connection of these four-pair cables, both in the outlets and in the patch panels, must follow some precepts, some ways for me to put all the pairs correctly and have no loss in data speed. But I already made videos for that kind of thing. I will leave here in the video description some video links on how to connect the 4- pair UTP cable in patch panels and outlets.
The purpose of this video was to show the advantage of structured cabling , showing an installation in a small location, a small office, a home office. Then that's it! Thank you for following up here, I hope it helped.
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