Out of the many things we consider when designing our business, it is a rare owner or manager
who considers the “nervous system” of their business: structured cabling. Who thinks about
that? You turn on a computer or a cash register here and it simply talks to everything there,
right?
So what the heck is “structured cabling” anyway?
According to the Fiber Optic Association, “structured cabling is the standardized architecture
and components for communications cabling.” There is indeed a right way and a wrong way to
run cable and connect your systems and peripherals to one another. For many businesses,
expansion has been explosive, and as such, the cabling plan has become…a bit disorganized.
Even for a business just in the initial phases of implementation, it is worth it to put some thought
into your cabling and infrastructure. Here are a few reasons why.
The main benefit to a structured cabling implementation is that your cables and backbone will all
be clearly laid out and organized. It reduces clutter, streamlines operations, and makes it much
easier to reorganize assets when movement becomes necessary. It also makes it much easier
for your support staff to track down problems when something goes wrong, rather than trying to
follow that one cable through a rats’ nest of unlabeled cables all stuffed into a wall somewhere.
However, the other side of structured cabling may be the most important: what happens when
you do not have a structured cabling plan. Disorganized cabling can lead to serious problems—
cables can be damaged when not routed properly, and routers and hubs can be impossible to
figure out when not laid out according to an overarching plan. Restricted airflow to components
can cause overheating, and heat is the enemy of all integrated electronics. And the simple fact
is that anything involving your cabling backend will take ten times as long to fix if (when)
something does go wrong.
At NSC Information Technology Group we are wizards with structured cabling. If you are
planning a fresh install or an upgrade, we can design and implement a stable cabling plan that
is expandable as your business grows. And, if you’ve been working without a cabling plan all
along and have a disorganized collection of cables and hardware to show for it, NSC
Information Technology Group can help you bring order out of your cabling chaos. Contact NSC
Information Technology Group and get a handle on your structured cabling today.