Q: What are the physical network considerations?
There are many physical [network] considerations to take into account.
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Specifically to LANs, what kind of copper you are going to run to the desk is one of the first considerations. There are different categories of copper cabling: CAT 5, CAT 5E, CAT 6 and so on. The better [cables] can run higher-speed networking, but they cost more. I believe that wiring is usually a 30-year investment in a building, so I usually tend toward the higher-quality cabling, because even though we might be doing 100-Megabit [speeds] to the desktop today, Gigabit to the desktop is becoming the bare standard now, and [speeds will be] even faster in the future.
If there's new construction, what I find is that the cost of running wiring is dominated by the cost of construction. If the walls are going to be opened up because it's new construction, it doesn't matter if you're running CAT 5 or 6 -- the walls are open, that's the expensive part, so run the best stuff you can.
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There are other physical [network] considerations like labeling. Labeling sounds like a very simple, unimportant issue, but actually it's incredibly important to the maintainability of a network. It's important to come up with a consistent scheme for labeling the [network] jacks. Wiring closets should also be numbered. If you've been asked to build a network that's in a computer room, a labeling structure is important. I tell the engineers that I work with that if a machine is unlabeled, I'm allowed to power it off because I don't want dangerous equipment in my machine room, and an unlabeled piece of equipment is just an accident waiting to happen.
Return to the network infrastructure design FAQ guide and read the rest of Tom's expert responses.
This was first published in March 2008