Cabling Pathways and Spaces Standard

Written by Julianus Yu

Here we share about the cabling-system components outlined by the ANSI/TIA/EIA-569-A Commercial Building Telecommunications Pathways and Spaces Standard for concealing, protecting, and routing your cable plant.

Conduit
Conduit is pipe. It can be metallic or nonmetallic, rigid or flexible (as permitted by the applicable electrical code), and it runs from a work area to a wiring closet. One advantage of using conduit to hold your cables is that it may already exist in your building. Assuming the pipe has space, it shouldn’t take long to pull your cables through it. When drafting specifications for conduit, we recommend that you require that enough conduit be installed so that it would be only 40 percent full by your current cable needs. Conduit should only be filled to a maximum of 60 percent, so this margin leaves you with room for future growth.

According to the ANSI/TIA/EIA-569-A Standard, conduit can be used to route horizontal and backbone cables. Firestopped conduit can also be used to connect wiring closets in multistoried buildings. In no cases should communication cables be installed in the same conduit as electrical cables without a physical barrier between them.

Cable Trays
As an alternative to conduit, cable trays can be installed to route your cable. Cable trays are typically wire racks specially designed to support the weight of a cable infrastructure. They provide an ideal way to manage a large number of horizontal runs. Cables simply lie within the tray, so they are very accessible when it comes to maintenance and troubleshooting.

Raceways
Raceways are special types of conduits used for surface mounting horizontal cables and are usually pieced together in a modular fashion with vendors providing connectors that do not exceed the minimum bend radius. Raceways are mounted on the outside of a wall in places where cable is not easily installed inside the wall; they are commonly used on walls made of brick or concrete where no telecommunications conduit has been installed.

Fiber-Protection Systems
As with raceways, fiber-protection systems are special types of conduits and cablemanagement systems designed specifically to address the special protection needs of opticalfiber cable. Although maintaining proper bend radius is important for all cable media, severe bends in optical-fiber cable will result in attenuation and eventual signal loss, which translates to lost data, troubleshooting, downed network connections, and lost productivity. Severe bends can also lead to cracking and physical failure of the fiber. To protect your fiber investment, we recommend that you consider investing in a fiber-protection system.

When evaluating a prospective fiber-protection system, you should account for the total cost of the installation rather than the cost of materials. Also ensure that it will support the weight of your cable without sagging. In addition, because your network will grow with time, you should consider how flexible the solution will be for future modifications. The most expensive part of your system will be the labor costs associated with the installation.