How to Do Proper Cable Management
When you’re building or retrofitting your network infrastructure, you don’t always have the staff or resources to design your layout. Telect has a Custom Configured Solutions team with the expertise to design cable raceways and rack architecture.
This is the fifth in a Telect blog series, entitled The A-B-Cs of Cable Management. Application Engineer Jason Charette describes how a custom configured solution can save your company time and money.
Fiber optic cables often need to navigate through tight or awkward spaces, around corners and over ducts.
We’ve even had to route our CableLinks through a hole in the wall to connect an adjacent room.
Your optical fiber network needs to be logical and flexible. The increasing demand for more bandwidth, more capacity, faster speeds and lower latency is forcing us to consider growth and expansion. I’ve seen more than 570 fibers per run in one installation and I know — with the race to faster, bigger wireless service — that fiber counts are only going to keep going up.
That’s a lot of stress for network managers, especially when you know your company’s profit base hinges on your ability to scale your network.
When it comes to planning to densify your network, you need to ensure easy access to cable, clear identification and defined routing paths.
The right cable raceway design will help improve network performance, reduce energy costs, ease maintenance and lead to faster deployment during scaling efforts. Our end-to-end cable management solution, WaveTrax, accounts for the weight of the cable, bend-radius requirements, waterfall dropouts and other support methods that allow you to route cable without damage.
Do-it-yourself cable routing
If you’re roped into planning your cable pathway yourself, here a few tips to remember.
1. Be precise
Make sure you measure everything. When you’re accurate with your tape measure, you reduce the amount of waste and, in turn, cost.
2. Plan for later
Sure, measure for accuracy but make sure you have enough slack cable for maintenance and mining.
3. Stay true to the bend
Fiber cable is delicate and you have to ensure you’re paying attention to bend radius. Too far of a bend and you’re risking fractures and attenuation.
4. Keep the paths clear
You sometimes need quick access to cable. Keeping it on a defined route through your cable managers and vertical drops helps.
5. Don’t overfill
Overloading your trays can lead to excess weight and buckling. Too many fibers in your cable managers can clog up and give you a mess of spaghetti that makes identification and access nearly impossible.
6. Plan for growth
Allow for expansion with the fill capacity of Wavetrax. It’s easier to go one size up now then to have to retrofit later.
A better idea FOR CABLE MANAGEMENT
The Telect Custom Configured Solutions team has decades of experience in designing and building network infrastructure. We work hard to understand your network’s facility and how it’s probably unique to anything we’ve worked on before.
We take your specifications and develop a cable management solution with our WaveTrax and articulating CableLinks products. When you provide us with your floor plan, we create drawings on an overhead layout and a full Bill of Materials (BOM).
A solid cable pathway design can be the difference in your network running optimally and efficiently. It can help reduce the risk or duration of network downtime.
Instead of wondering where you went wrong when you can’t find cable or your network suffers, make sure it’s done right the first time.
Jason Charette and Brad Hawkins are Application Engineers at Telect. They have decades of experience designing cable management solutions for major telecommunications networks and enterprise data centers. There isn’t a hole in the wall they can’t find a solution for to make sure your fiber optic cable finds the right path.
Fiber Optic Blog 