Wall-Plate Design and Installation Issues

Written by Julianus Yu

When you plan your cabling-system installation, you must be aware of a few wall-plate installation issues to make the most efficient installation. The majority of these installation issues come from compliance with the ANSI/TIA/EIA-570-A (for residential) and ANSI/TIA/EIA-568-B (for commercial installations) telecommunications Standards. You’ll have to make certain choices about how best to conform to these Standards based on the type of installation you are doing. These choices will dictate the different steps you’ll need to take during the installation of the different kinds of wall plates.

Manufacturer System

There is no “universal” wall plate. Hundreds of different wall plates are available, each with its design merits and drawbacks. The most important thing to remember about using a particular manufacturer’s wall-plate system in your structured-cabling system is that it is a system. Each component in a wall-plate system is designed to work with the other components and, generally speaking, can’t be used with components from other systems. When designing your cabling system, you must choose the manufacturer and wall-plate system that best suits your needs.

Wall-Plate Location

When installing wall plates, you must decide the best location on the wall. Obviously, the wall plate should be fairly near the workstation, and in fact, the ANSI/-TIA/EIA-568-B Standard says that the maximum length from the workstation to the wall-plate patch cable can be no longer than 5 meters (16 feet). If you already have your office laid out, you will have to locate the wall plates as close as possible to the workstations so that your wiring system will conform to the Standard.

Additionally, you want to keep wall plates away from any source of direct heat that could damage the connector or reduce its efficiency. In other words, don’t place a wall plate directly above a floor heating register or baseboard heater. You must account for the vertical and horizontal positions of the wall plate. Both positions have implications, and you must understand them before you design your cabling system.

Wall-Plate Mounting System

Another decision you must make regarding your wall plates is how you will mount them to the wall. Three main systems, each with their own unique applications, are used to attach wall plates to a wall:

Outlet boxes

The most common wall-plate mounting in commercial applications is the outlet box, which is simply a plastic or metal box attached to a stud in a wall cavity. Outlet boxes have screw holes in them that allow a wall plate to be attached. Additionally, they usually have some provision (either nails or screws) that allows them to be attached to a stud. These outlet boxes, as their name suggests, are primarily used for electrical outlets, but they can also be used for telecommunications wiring because the wall plates share the same dimensions and mountings.

Cut-in plates

Outlet boxes work well as wall-plate supports when you are able to access the studs during the construction of a building. But what type of wall-plate mounting system do you use once the drywall is in place and you need to put a wall plate on that wall? Use some kind of cut-in mounting hardware (also called remodeling or retrofit hardware), so named because you cut a hole in the drywall and place into it some kind of mounting box or plate that will support the wall plate. This type of mounting is used when you need to run a cable into a particular stud cavity of a finished wall.

Surface-mount outlet boxes

The final type of wall-plate mounting system is the surface-mount outlet box, which is used where it is not easy or possible to run the cable inside the wall (in concrete, mortar, or brick walls, for example). Cable is run in a surface-mount raceway (a round or flat conduit) to an outlet box mounted (either by adhesive or screws) on the surface of the wall.

Fixed-Design or Modular Plate

Another design and installation decision you have to make is whether to use fixed-design or modular wall plates. Fixed-design plates are usually used in telephone applications rather than LAN wiring applications because, although they are cheap, they have limited flexibility. Modular wall plates, on the other hand, are generic and have multiple jack locations. In a modular wall plate system, this plate is known as a faceplate (it’s not a wall plate until it has its jacks installed). Jacks for each faceplate are purchased separately from the wall plates.