Structured wiring allows the
electrician to take care of the difficult part of cabling, with a minimum of
cost, effort, and clutter, while still making sure that the cabling works
correctly. Even though multiple cables are used, the net result of the cabling
simply needs to ensure that the correct twisted pairs end up at the right place
in the connectors at the endpoints. And the only cables that the people in the
offices can see are the short ones between the PC and the wall plate; the rest
of the cables are hidden.
Imagine that if instead of structured wiring, the electrician
simply ran a single cable from the computer, under the floor, and straight into
the hub in the wiring closet. Later, the person in the cubicle decides that she
wants her PC on the left side of her desk, and she might discover that the cable
is too short. So what does she do? She calls the electrician and asks for
another cable to be run.
Of course, the electrician probably isn't going to want to run
a new cable from the cubicle to the wiring closet. If he had used structured
wiring, he could have run a cable from the wall plate to the patch panel in the
wiring closet. A patch panel, sometimes called a
wiring panel, provides the
electrician a place to connect the actual wires in the cable on one side of the
panel. On the other side, receptacles, much like the ones in the wall plate in
the cubicle, allow the electrician or network engineer to use a short cable to
connect those pairs of wires to some other devices, such as the hub shown in Figure 4-13.
Because the patch panel is located in a well-known place, and
because the wall plate in the cubicles does not move, the electrician can do the
hard part (running the cables under the floor) once. If the PC in the cubicle
needs to be moved farther away from the wall, the PC user can get a slightly
longer patch cable. A patch cable is simply a short LAN
cable. Likewise, inside the wiring closet, short patch cables can be used to
connect from the patch panel to the networking device, such as the hub shown in
Figure 4-13.
You can think of structured wiring as the equivalent of having
the DOT build your roads versus just using dirt roads. It takes time, planning,
effort, and more cost, but in the end, you have a much better road system. With
structured wiring, you end up with much better wiring and far less clutter.
Furthermore, you can make changes without a lot of effort.
The benefits of structured cabling can be summarized as
follows:
-
Helps minimize the need for running new cables because the
distance from each wall plate to the wiring panel can be determined easily
-
Allows PC installers to run a short patch cable from the wall
plate to the PC, without requiring help from the electrician
-
Allows network engineers to run a short patch cable from the
wiring panel to the networking devices, such as a hub
-
Helps keep the wiring closet more organized
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