Planning The Route

Having decided to use fiber optics and chosen equipment appropriate for the application, it’s time to determine exactly where the cable plant and hardware will be located. One thing to remember – every installation will be unique. The actual placement of the cable plant will be determined by the physical locations along the route, local building codes or laws and other individuals involved in the designs. As usual, premises and outside plant installations are different so we will consider them separately.

Premises and campus installations can be simpler since the physical area involved is smaller and the options fewer. Start with a good set of architectural drawings and, if possible, contact the architect, contractor and/or building manager. Having access to them means you have someone to ask for information and advice. Hopefully the drawings are available as CAD files so you can have a copy to do the network cabling design in your computer, which makes tweaking and documenting the design so much easier.

If the building is still in the design stage, you may have the opportunity to provide inputs on the needs of the cable plant. Ideally, that means you can influence the location of equipment rooms, routing of cable trays and conduits, availability of adequate conditioned power and separate data grounds, sufficient air-conditioning and other needs of the network. For pre-existing buildings, detailed architectural drawings will provide you with the ability to route cabling and network equipment around the obstacles invariably in your way.

Outside plant (OSP) cabling installations have enormous variety depending on the route the cable must take. The route may cross long lengths of open fields, run along paved rural or urban roads, cross roads, ravines, rivers or lakes, or, more likely, some combination of all of these. It could require buried cables, aerial cables or underwater cables. Cable may be in conduit, innerduct or direct buried, aerial cables may be self-supporting or lashed to a messenger. Longer runs often include crossing water, so the cable may be underwater or be lashed across a bridge with other cables.

December 26, 2011

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