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The Problem Of Unused Cabling
Makarand writes "Technological advances constantly render functional cable obsolete by
demanding data transfers at higher rates which older cabling cannot
support. New cables that support higher data rates are laid right over older wires.
The old wires are simply left in place and abandoned. This interesting article talks about the
problems
caused by abandoned cabling. According to an estimate several billion feet of
abandoned cable lies unused in the plenum spaces of buildings that allow air to circulate
creating a fire hazard. Also, very few firms currently worry about removing cabling when they
move out of a building."
Wonder how much it would cost to remove and recover the metals in unused cables, and would it be offset by the sale of the metal?
Who really cares?
Several years ago, I took some of that old cabling and stripped out the copper wire. I then used that wire as the loop on fishing sinkers. Saved me a good $0.02 - $0.05 per sinker, and I got to go fishing all summer. Life's pretty good sometimes.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
Because he's a pedophile and insane.
What sucks about him is that he's an american. Pathetic.
The article mentions that it is now standard practice for companies leaving a building to cut the network/phone cabling just before they go.
How damn stupid is that?? What else are they going to do, break the bloody windows?!
I've used old cabling to fish through the new cabling. I'm lazy like that.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Also, very few firms currently worry about removing cabling when they move out of a building.
s _etc>
Well, we have a sattelite dish that our tennant installed, and we kept it in place, because our estate agent thought "It would make the place more attractive".
So, whats better?
Leaving ethernet points in = $0
Pulling out and putting in new ones = <insert_cost_of_pulling_out_+_putting_in_+_permit
i'd think the cables block the airflow, rather than start it??
This is one of those situations where it's just so *easy* to not take responsibility. I think the final solution in the article is best -- require a fairly large deposit when people move in, on top of requiring them to pay to install and remove the cable they use. If they don't remove it for whatever reason, you just take it out of their deposit.
This is the most logical way to handle the problem, but it puts the business using this method at a disadvantage becuase they are possibly requiring higher deposits than competitors.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
I can't RTFM so I will just say that if you look at some of the mess that companies actually leave such as old cat5 cables 1/2 hanging out the walls as well as some of the under floor.
I did work at a DC once where to lay in new cable under the floor you had to physically have someone to push other cables aside so you could get another cable in. There was meant to be 3 ft of room between the tiles and the concrete floor. IT was all full of cables.
They had a lot of downtime as each time your moved one cable it ended becoming disconnected from the switch or the machine. Soon went bust
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
anyone got a copy of the page, please post looks like even with only 5 replies the site is down ...
/. ;0)
a quickie
must remember to uninstall the Service Pack! oops, would that be doing a favor?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
1. Feed loose end of cable out of building, into carpark.
2. Attach cable to axel of bosses car, and forge email from CEO's wife saying she wants him now.
3. Watch boss drive off at great speed.
4. ?????
5. Profit.
Removing cable can be a little tricky (you don't really want to put new strain on the production cables), but it is generally recyclable which can pay for the operation. However, if you start removing things, you had better make sure that the cables are tagged.
See my journal, I write things there
Isn't that why you use plenum rated cable in those spaces?
I don't know if I really believe this article all that much. A couple years back, at the place I work (*cough* will be unemployed from after Wednesday), they upgraded the network to CAT-6 and three times the ports. That meant they had to rewire the entire front office cubefarm, which is two stores with a 6" subfloor each, and wiring columns running between stories.
When all those cables converge on a wiring closet, they start to get bundled up pretty high. There's almost no room to run additional cables, plus it would be a huge unsightly mess. We hired an outside contractor to do the job, so they did professional work and disposed of the old wiring. They almost had to...with a 6" subfloor, you either pull cables through with the old wiring, or rip up every single carpet square and floor tile. I can't imagine this situation being much different for other companies.
...
Bob Maderious will never forget the lease he brokered for property advertised as "plug and play" - only to find that it wasn't.
His client had been thrilled that state-of-the-art wires and cables left behind by the former tenant would allow the new company to move in, plug in and go to work. Thrilled, that is, until moving day when the company discovered the previous tenant had cut the cables.
"Cut it and left it," said Maderious, a broker with Grubb & Ellis. "I said, 'Hey, what's the deal with this?' (A broker) told me that the tech companies do that. They believe it's their investment in the space; why should a potential competitor get it for free?
"The lease documentation had not caught up with practice."
It still hasn't, but more brokers, landlords and property managers are catching on. Part of the reason is a change in the 2002 National Electric Code that requires the removal of abandoned cabling. The new code is not due to become effective in California until 2005 - unless this week's edict by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to suspend state regulations renders the code unenforceable. Literally, millions of miles of unused cable lurk in the nation's buildings.
The situation has been exacerbated during the past decade by technological advances that render functional cable obsolete. Not only are there cables for telephones, computers and faxes, but every few years cables are manufactured that transmit data at higher speeds and business wants data as fast as it can get it so new cables are laid over the old wires.
It is estimated that 60 billion feet of cable have been abandoned in the plenum spaces that allow air circulation through a building, creating a fire hazard. Older cable could be particularly toxic in a fire.
"Year after year, people come in with new technology and don't bother to remove the old cable. It's out of sight out of mind." said Brian Turpen, president of All Systems, a San Ramon company founded in 1990 that installs and removes cable infrastructure. "I've seen ceiling tiles bending under the weight of old cable. There's so much congestion. It's become a problem with cabling falling out of the ceiling onto people's heads."
Jay Miller, construction manager for Equity Office Properties, the largest publicly traded building owner in the country with more than 700 buildings and 124 million square feet of space, said he has witnessed what happens when high-tech companies move out of their space - it's not a pretty sight. Two major tenants, Automatic Data Processing Inc., which left ADP Plaza in San Ramon for Bishop Ranch, and PeopleSoft Inc., which moved into its own buildings in Pleasanton, are prime examples.
"Here you had two companies instrumental in development of the properties and at one point were part owners of their buildings. The leases we had were not as strict as they ordinarily would be," Miller said. "In each of those cases, the companies had server rooms and phone closets scattered throughout the building, with miles of telephone and data cable that was left in place."
Miller noted that PeopleSoft spent 10 years in their buildings. As the company grew, so did their cable infrastructure. "Now we're faced with the prospect of having to remove it," he said.
As in most leases, Equity's contracts contain clauses requiring tenants to return the property to its original state once they leave, but that can be a tough clause to enforce, Miller noted. Buildings change hands, tenants move in, expand, go bankrupt and move out; meanwhile the cables continue to multiply.
The problem of removing cable is twofold: It is not an easy job, especially if it requires finding and removing cables that run from, say, the 38th floor to the basement; Also, there is the question of who pays for the removal - the tenant who installed it and left five years ago, the new tenant just moving in or the building's owner?
"When a tenant moves into second-generation space, they get a tenant improvement allowance. They
Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly.
What about the problem of used cabling.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Any place with a decent set of fire codes, and people who are actually following them, shouldn't be worrying. FT-5/Plenum cable is simply not a danger.
Now, if residential "wood burns faster so who cares" FT-1 vinyl cable is used, you get what you pay for. That being said, if the fire inspector ever sees that stuff, you'll probably be looking at a really juicy fine.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Just put a sign out front, Free Cable.
I guarantee you will get some electrician come pull every piece out. And it will not cost you a dime.
What about burning the whole place down and having fun watching the potential competitor restoring it ? Isn't it an ethical issue ?
The fire hazard argument seems to be made up just for the sake of the article to make it sound important. There is a lot of infrastructure, and it had to be planned properly anyway, fire or not. What, if someone moves in, the whole office becomes unusable ? Lack of information about existing wiring or it's uselessness, I see. So what ? Either you do it properly all the way or you'll have problems at some point later. No insurance will do the trick.
I like my outfit, it's inexpensive, but cool -- April Ryan
When our office decided to re-cable we were told by the building that we couldn't pull new cable unless we removed all the old cable. It turns out the previous tenants had re-cabled at least three times before. We were initially quoted tens of thousands of dollars to have it removed but finally found a contractor who would remove it all for just a few thousand. As it turns out he had horribly underestimated the job and upon completion, expressed to us how much he had under-quoted us but still held to his quote.
All in all, having pre-existing wiring is a double-edged sword. New tenants might like the idea of saving on cabling and such, but also can come back and bite you when it comes time to upgrade.
It surprises me that landlords over there do not take the same view, though it is possible that there is some liability question under US law of which I am unaware.
We are not without our cabling problems here though, my first job was at a major university, in a 1930s building. The original rubber insulated telephone cables were disused but still in place, and they had coagulated into a malevolent black mass in the risers and cable ducts. I am told they have now been removed, I pity the poor people who had to do it, they must have had to cut them out with an angle grinder.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
Several billion feet? That's not long enough to reach Mars even when it came really close recently: it was still over 180 billion feet away.
Nevertheless, there is plenty of cable for making a link to the moon, which is merely about 1.3 billion feet from Earth. Of course, one may need quite a few bridges along the way to keep the signal alive and deal with the variety of recycled cable types :-) Also, the cable may need to be attached to one of the earth's poles to avoid getting wrapped around the earth by the moon's rotation.
Wow, a cable to the moon would be quite an amazing feat of engineering. Do you think it may be remotely possible?
I know that here in Massachusetts the state laws require contractors to remove unused cable from plenums, raised floors, etc. when doing any renovation that involves those spaces. As was explained to me by one contractor the primary reason is the toxic gasses that can be released by PVC & other plastic coatings when they catch fire. Apparently contractors can be fined if they don't remove unused cables. This actually caused a problem at one place where I worked - we had 3/4 of a floor in a renovated office and the other 1/4 was vacant. When that space was leased out it was rebuilt and one day in the middle of the construction all our network connections on the walls between our space and this other space suddenly stopped working. The contractors incorrectly assumed that these were old cables so they ripped them out. Needless to say they ended up paying to have new cables run, but that took a couple days...
The right cabling makes perfect feedline for HF radio applications. I removed well over 300 feet of Twinax from the building I work in, and I could take all I wanted for free. [I now feed a 40-meter dipole with it]. The loss characteristics are about the same is RG-8.
All you amateur radio operators/SWL'ers, offer to remove the stuff for free.
One caveat, it is really dirty work, depending upon the building.
You mean they were not using the fire resistant (and more expensive) "Plenum Grade" Cable.
In montreal, we have quite a few buildings where several companies are installed, and when it comes to cabling, you just can not install anything yourself. You rent the space, you rent the lines.
You need a new drop ? No problem, a contractor is on site to install them, label them, keep track of them.
It can lead to some pretty conflicts, but overall, when you get used to the fact that your responsability ends at the wall jack, it's a pretty good way to relieve us IT guys from one of the most boring area of the job.
Marriage is considered capital punishment for the theft of a goat in some third world countries...
... and loose all cables in half that time.
:-)
Double profit ! $$$$$
..leave a building with unused cables and the street pirates will get it, don't worry.
There is an old hotel where the elevator motors on the roof have had all the copper stripped off and there are holes in the walls where people have torn wiring out.
People have also stolen manhole covers here to sell for scrap, so I guess anything is fair game.
A. Limitation of Knowledge. The guys who do a lot of the wiring work don't know what the cables do -- believe it or not. My two most experienced, and best, pullers couldn't tell you what ethernet was if their life depended on it. Heck, I had one guy who didn't know what T568b was, but could punch down Cat5 to a T568b block in five seconds flat. All they knew was what they were told to install.
In the past I had specifically had discussions with them about pulling cables out. Unless they are explicitly directed by the landlord of the building (who knows even LESS than they do) they will not, and probably should not, touch cables that are pre-existing. This is due to fear of not knowing what they could be doing, and worse, what they are, or aren't, doing.
B. Cross-office runs. In one of my buildings, for example, each floor was an average of 12,500 feet. The average office was 800 sq. ft. Most floors had upwards of 10-12 offices on them. In order to get riser pulls (cabling run in the central, vertical risers of the building) to office drops (termination points for those cables), these typically ran over the other offices. It was typical for the first office, closest to the riser) to have anywhere from 20-40 cables running through their plenum cores that had nothing to do with that office.
Imagine you come in Monday morning, after a neighbor moved in that weekend, to find all your cabling (data, phone, cable TV, leased lines) had be removed by the overly eager data people.
C. Simple CBA. The bottomline for any real estate firm is, well, the bottomline. The risk of fire due to overly full cabling space is fairly minimal compared to the risk of losing money and facing lawsuits -- or worse, losing tenants.
The cost of pulling existing cabling plus the risk of damaging infrastructure minus the value of open space is just not in the favor of making the change. It's really that simple.
When all is said and done, with my engineering cap on, I'd like to see thorough documentation on cables and better diagrams of floors showing what cable goes where -- and it's really not that hard. But try telling a rushing tenant that they have to wait two weeks while your engineering team documents cables, yeah right.
Also, with my engineering cap on, I'd make one suggestion for anyone moving into a new office. If you are going to pull out the old cables, and it is in roughly strong strength, use it to snake your new cables! That's what we often did. There are a few snares with this trick to watch out for, but if you have good pullers they'll know what to do -- if you give them the green light.
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
I've considered this idea more generally in the past... paying a 'disposal fee' up-front on new goods to pay for their end-of-life costs. There are two problems with this idea:
1: Technology changes, and those end-of-life costs are going to change, sometimes up, sometimes down. This in itself isn't a terrible problem, but it couples into problem 2.
2: Disposal escrow would wind up creating some huge lumps of money. IMHO, whenever there's a huge lump of money, there's also a class of people who will find a way to attach themselves to it and start sucking it dry. In other words, that lump will never survive to do what it was supposed to do - pay disposal costs. Relative to item 1, someone (from that class) will find a 'new technology' to handle disposal and use the fund to develop that new technolgy. Maybe it'll work, maybe not, but odds are that the point will have been to gain access to the money, not to develop technology. Let's presume that 50% of the time the technology falls through, and the money's gone. We're right back where we started, only with a broken promise and either an environmental mess or the need for another government bailout.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
As soon as this issue appears on the radar screens of fire marshalls, it will be dealt with. Restricting air flow in the plenums and having materials which emit toxic fumes during combustion in suspended ceilings would get most firemen wound up.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
We haven't allowed "abandon in place" for a few years now. Our ceilings are so much cleaner now.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
i had trouble parsing the original sentence, too...perhaps the following will help:
According to an estimate,
several billion feet of abandoned cable lies unused
(in the plenum spaces of buildings that allow air to circulate),
creating a fire hazard.
We actually had a flag day, a few years ago, when a load of new comm. gear came in. The comm. guys spent days pulling up several layers of old cable 'cos they needed the space for the new. It made working under the floor much nicer. Now if we could get the power guys to stop laying 100kg of copper on top of our phone and data cables.... (Yeah, a structured wiring plan would help.)
:-|
And whenever I retire a cable, or find that some less industrious person has abandoned one, I pull it up *now* before it becomes part of a mat that's too much to deal with. It's a great way to be productive late on Friday afternoon when you don't want to touch production software just before the weekend. But then, I actually fasten the holddown screws on connector shells, too, so I'm obviously a fringe nutcase.
I have no problem taking any of your... older... non-advanced... cat5 cables. Please, allow me to help fight pollution.
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
...them's *pull strings*!
IIRC there are (were?) two types of cable the last time I pulled wire, plenum and riser.
The riser cable was supposed to be used when going between floors; it doesn't burn, thereby spreading the fire, but emits toxic smoke. The plenum cable was to be used in air circulation spaces, like above suspended ceilings; it will burn, but is less toxic.
The problem I faced was, what about when you have to do both? (Run a distance on one floor, then go up to another floor and run a fair distance in another air space.) Either way you are breaking code somewhere.
The mod system is irrational. Learn to enjoy its zen-like enlightenment. Striving to make sense of it will only give you grief, headaches, and sudden bloody diarrhea. (OK, maybe not that last one.)
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
...are belong to us.
I'm using the same CAT5 that I installed in 1997 for my network. 'Course, I'm still at 100 Mb, but that's not too bad. What continual upgrades are being referred to here?
Once, while working at SSA, I was running thinnet LAN drops in this one area. We discovered about 500 feet of coiled thinnet cabling tucked in the ceiling. Must have been put there by another contractor who wanted to charge them more. Ahhhh the good old days... oh, we removed it.
While I would love playing UT2K3 with my lunar friends, I'm afraid the ping times would suck. Bad.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
Like everything else, it comes down to risk. MOst often, all you can see is one end of a cable at a time, and you can't see how intertwined it may be with all those other calbes. To get it out you have to yank on it, which risks putting strain on everything else in there. And if one overzealous zip tie guy slapped one on in the middle there's no chance to get it by itself. The whole bundle will come out.
- Sig this!
> The problem I faced was, what about when you have to do both? (Run a distance on one floor, then go up to another floor and run a fair distance in another air space.) Either way you are breaking code somewhere.
If you don't want to break code, you split the cable at the turns, and use plenum for the floor runs and a section of riser cable for the floor change. Yes, it's inconvenient, but building codes are rarely written with convenience in mind. So, in a word, you don't use one long cable for that whole run.
Virg
It is estimated that 60 billion feet of cable have been abandoned in the plenum spaces that allow air circulation through a building, creating a fire hazard. Older cable could be particularly toxic in a fire.
Everywhere I have worked in recent years, local code has required the use of firestop at each floor with Vertical cabling. That way, there is no airflow between floors. Also, the plenum coated cabling is fire resistant. I have seen some abandoned cabling, but it's never been that big of a deal.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
I currently work for a property management company here in San Diego. We've had plenty of turnover in the last year or so, as a set of our buildings hit 5 years old, and we had several 5 year leases. Most of them were tech companies, or brokerage houses, which always have tons of network equipment and drops all throughout their space. We write our leases to include a little phrase that states they must remove all cabling, unless excluded in writing from the management company, upon exiting the building. And you know what? We stick to it. There's nothing worse for me or my guys than going up in a ceiling littered with wires - especially when a tenant half asses it and doesn't secure their wiring right, or leaves tons of unused cabling in the ceiling 'just in case.' This seems like it would be a pretty standard practice, and any owner / manager that doesn't have a clause like this in their lease is either lazy, or stupid, or both. The only exception to this is when we had a tenant go tits up. We just had to try to find a tenant that wanted the space as is, cabling and all. Fortunately we found one that wanted the whole floor and just dozed the place anyway.
I work in a typical broadcast installation that has seen a lot of changes over about 10 years. Each time, new coaxial cable was laid under the raised floor. First it was composite analog video and analog audio, then composite digital video and seperate AES/EBU audio, now 4:2:2 component digital video with embedded AES/EBU audio. Not to mention the addition and subtraction of channels and services, installation of new video switchers, routers, etc.
Today, there is 1 foot of solid coax under the entire raised floor. They try to pull out abandoned cable, but it generally is near impossible to do much of that while keeping the place on the air.
There should be some legislation that makes it illegal to cut the lines without removing them completely. When you vacate a space, the wiring should either be useable or gone.
If buildings wanted the company, when they move out, to remove the cabling they should put that in the rental contract - 'Upon vacation all cabling should be removed a charge of $50/cable is charged for any unremoved cabling'
Else it's the building's problem. So, if they consider it a problem they should remove the cabling within the spaces they own.
From what I have heard in news reports, people go down into the NYC subway system and cut the copper lines. Those are big F'ing wires though, about an inch in diameter. Apparently there is quite a bit of redundancy, because it doesnt effect operation of the system, though they were concerned that continued pillaging could start causing problems. However, I couldnt see how stealing cat3, coax or old phone cabling could ever really be considered a worthwhile activity. Even at retail, you can get 1000 ft for about $60. How is this cost effective? where does the market even exist to sell this stuff?
Just think about it for a second. If someone on the upper floors of the Twin Towers had had their wits about them, they could have ripped enough 10base5 cable from above the dropped ceilings to rappel all the way down to the ground.
I like how the article pushes the "fire hazard" angle, but doesnt' bother to look at which cabling, specifically, is the problem. It portrays it as a problem caused by companies installing network/phone wire recently, when the real problem wire is much older. Most new wire installed by knowledgeable installers is plenum rated-- which means it's self-extinguishing and not nearly as toxic when burned. The nastiest-burning wire you'll find in ceilings is the old pink-beige jacketed 25-200 pair phone cabling that was installed forty years ago by Ma Bell! What's more, much of this nasty multipair wire can't be pulled out because it's still being used. On top of it all, the toxic-fire hazard posed by wiring in the plenum space is miniscule compared to the nasty plastic crap that's in an office itself-- if there's a fire, that cheap desk chair burning is gonna put out nastier smoke than a bundle of cabling. Also, plenum air doesn't generally get pumped into anyone's office. Plenum spaces are used as return-air systems, so any smoke in there is going primarily into the building's air shaft, where it will set off a smoke detector that sends the air out a roof vent rather than back into the building.
Don't get me wrong, as a network cabling installer I'm all for the removal of old cable. I've seen cable trays so packed with old crap that I couldn't get another run through. But the need of some people to pose every problem as a dire safety hazard drives me up a tree. I'm willing to bet that there are very few buildings where the communications wiring is even one of the top five fire-safety hazards.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
What will Network Admins 20 years from now dig up and laugh about if we remove all the outdated cabling.
You ever find something really really old and put it to use as a joke? I found an old 16 port lantronix (LTR16T) 10-baseT hub that went for 849 dollars when it was new sitting the bottom of an old storage unit at work.
When my company deinstalled some old ESCON (mainframe) fibre cable, I took some of it and used it for clothesline. It's strong, it's orange, it's geek as hell.
Here at the 'oldest girls' school in the US' I can show you some wiring history! The vast majority of this school's been around almost 270 years. Some of our basements are a real treat.
:)
There's everything down there from the original 1900's-era wiring (before standardized sockets), to the refits done in the 30's, to the stuff put in a few times after that. One time fuse blew a few years ago and it took our electician almost 4 hours to FIND it.
When we got DSL a few years back, the phone company didn't ever try using the existing phone lines and just ran a CAT 5 to the trunk.
Things certainly look better now than they did a few years back, but there's still plenty of history stapled to the wood.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Really, this situation isn't too uncommon. I think that some network techs become like black widow spiders when it comes to cabling... laying it like a web to trap unwary visitors. Look closely... anyone see a maintenance person trapped in there somewhere?
Seriously though, as far as cable volume this is nothing. Right now one of the sites I'm working at has over 200 cables, and when all your networking hardware is in one room running it to a connection becomes slightly messy no matter how you do it. Granted it's not as bad as in the picture shown, but still enough that trying to trace individual cables can become a long and arduous task.
I'd hate to imagine what this could be like in larger companies, making 500+ cables run nicely has got to be a not-so-fun task in any situation...
Bad kids/students might construct Tesla coils or EMP generators if they were allowed access to large amounts of wire. It's not safe. Or they might build a giant electro magnet and use it to attract somebody's car into a ditch.
Children and non-qualified personnel should not be given access to so much wire.
But back on the subject, running through the basement is a massive nasty bundle of electrical and communication cable. It runs along the ceiling and seems to get bigger around every rennovation. When you talk about trunk lines, this literally grows like one.
I lucked out in that one of my predicessors ran multimode fiber back in the early 90's. Lots of multimode fiber. Finding the endpoints is like a treasure hunt, though. You read old diagrams with descriptions like "Future Earth" and "Optics", only to discover that "Future Earth" is not the traveling exhibit space, and the "Optics" exhibit is now a utlilty space inbetween the new "Sports" exibit and the "Changing Earth", which hasn't since I was a kid.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
You may have this problem at work, and really, it's not a problem to you, since everything is working as it should. It becomes a problem when, suddenly, critical PC #962 loses networking capability, and you have to find out which cable is dead and where between it and #961 other cables.
I think this is the point between where people do one of several things:
a) Run a whole new cable if the distance isn't huge, then you have #962 cables, and this does add up over time.
b) Split an existing cable with a hub or whatever, then you have a dead cable in the ceiling.
c) Try to trace the dead cable and replace it. When you have a heart-attack going through crawlspaces they may have a dead technician in the ceiling (from experience, the places where these cables reside are often not fun to visit)
Actaully I am planning on redoing the electrical in my 1949 house, and leaving the old electrical wire dead and grounded - 55 year old 12 gauge copper just doesn't pull very easily. Anybody know if this rule applies to electrical wiring?
- Thomas;
___ This sig is in boldface to emphasize its importance!
Even when the cable is obsolete, it is useful for pulling new cable through. It is a shame to have to redo all that crawl space work when leaving one wire between nodes while removing would be so easy.
In fact, because of these inefficiencies with the exiting tenant rule, I actually prefer a rule requiring the incoming tenent to either use existing cable or remove it.
Those are big F'ing wires though, about an inch in diameter.
Even at retail, you can get 1000 ft for about $60.
Not if it's an inch in diameter.
If I were a wireless networking company I'd be sending out reprints of this article to all my customers...
Oh, and then I'd work on fixing security, so some yahoo in the parking lot can't tap into the corporate network! On second thought, maybe I'd do this one first...
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
Why even do all that? As one person pointed out. This should be considered a capital improvement, and the issue of what goes were can easily be delt with. Companies might even be encouraged to document, and leave it by adding the amount to the deposit they get back. Sort of a "landlord rewarding tenants for improvemets that increase value".
One of the problems is germs and other "unhealthy" materials. Ductwork can be one of the biggest sources of illness in the workplace.
A day or two before Mohter's day in 1984 the At&t central office serving the then sole call center for FTD was busy removing old cabling. The were pulling wires along a metal trough when one of them stripped and started a fire. The whole central office was shut down for at least a few days due to the blaze and FTD couldn't get any more orders in for Mother's Day, the biggest day of the year for flower deliveries(yes bigger than Valentine's day). FTD got a second call center shortly after that. I can't find a web page about this incident so anyone with more details or a link, please reply. I believe this was somewhere near Chicago.
I think that part of the problem is that most buildings aren't really designed to have cables ran through them. Plus will wireless technologies reduce this particular problem?
"It's not about the money. It's about how much copper wiring you can rip out of the walls."
IMH(Cowardly)O, the root of the problem is our distinctly American habit of ignoring any financial problem that falls after the coming quarter. Why remove the old tenant's cables when the whole shoddily-built office strip will be torn down or completely remodeled within ten years anyway?
I'm reminded of Steve Martin attempting to impress the English woman in "L.A. Story": "Some of these buildings are over *twenty* years old!"
When one of my employers moved into a new building, we realized that we were going to have to run one cable very, very far. Fortunately, my boss poked around and found an old 10/100 fiber cable had been run from one end of the office to the other-so we just tossed some copper ethernet adapters on either end and stuck switches on either end. Not wonderful, but it beat the hell out of running cables through 100 feet of plenum.
Even if the people were to cut the wires as close to the patch panel as possible, wouldn't this be the corporate equivalent of the gradual degraduation of teleomeres?
Yes, and buildings eventually get torn down, don't they? Therefore cabling must have something to do with the aging of buildings!
From the landlord's point of view, the perfect (small office) tenant is an insurance agent or a doctor's office. Anyone who has predictable and regular office hours, and won't be bringing in a lot of funny hi-tech gear, or have odd ideas about quality of service. Speaking as a former landlord, I'd much rather have an office with some "hi-tech gear" in it than something that generates a lot of foot traffic and cars coming and going all day in my parking lot like a doctor's office. The best tenants I ever had were a sales rep who was only in the office four days a month and an insurance agent (who did have some funny hi-tech gear, but did very little work in the office). Landlords don't care about your office hours, since we don't live in the building. As long as your business doesn't annoy me or the other tenants or do anything illegal I don't care what you do in your rented space. As for "quality of service", what is that? Are you referring to how often the dumpster is emptied or some non-landlord issue?
Putting moderation advice in your
Take all the unused cabling and thread unused AOL Trial CD's and you have yourself a great way to trim that Tree!
Dolemite
________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
Going forward, why not designate walls and such as "wired walls" much like raised floors are used for running wire. Make things a bit easier, I expect, for removal/locating wires.
Face it, people are stupid, and the internet is the place where they all meet.
I only care about one wire: the T1 line. All the rest can be wireless. With LEAP authentication or RADIUS, who cares about all the other wires?
oh wait, we all still require land lines for phone access... *sigh* where's my GSM in the building? I don't want any more wires!!
-gam
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
And Darwin was wrong! Evolution does not weed out the weak! Instead they become our elected officials and college professors!
"The first thing we must do is kill all the lawyers" - Henry VI, Wm. Shakespeare
if this cabling could not be used to set up some sort of ExtraNet.
Linking old/unused/unowned cables might make for a really cool hobbyists network if the locations of the cables could be known and the cables could be linked cheaply. Of course, a bunch of serial and coax cables would make for a fairly slow ExtraNet, but it would still be cool to route around the controls currently being imposed by our corporate masters.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Just finished updating our site for 802.11b. Now, mgmt wants to change it all again!!! 802.11g infrastructure is just gonna have to be up there with the new .g.
I live in an old house (1840), in the UK, and when we had the floors up we found lead piping for gas lighting, which was the premium source of light before electicity came along.
After admiring the historical quaintess of century and a half old technology, we pulled it up and sold it for enough to cover some of the costs of the woodwork repairs, then laid down CAT5 (attenuation in stone is atrocious, especially for 802.11a, so CAt5 is the backbone).
I hope in another 150 years someone will find the cat5 wiring and find it equally quaint, as they laugh at 100mbit bandwidth and IPv4 net addresses. At least I hope so -as I doubt they will find as much resale value in the wires as we did in the lead pipes.
"Bart, it's not about how much money you make... it's about how much copper wiring you can get out of the building with!" *rrrrrip!*
-Head Geek from Dotcom Bust Episode
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
And rightly so, under Australian law at least. English and Australian law has a concept of 'tenants fixture' in commercial leases. A 'fixture' is any item (light fittings, exhaust fans, air conditioning ducts, cabling, etc) added to the tenancy (property). A 'tenants fixture' is something that the tenanct can take with him when he leaves. The other sort (can't remember the name, 'landlord's fixture' maybe?) is that which becomes part of the property and stays
The differentiator is the way in which the item is attached to the property. Carpets stay, rugs go. Light fittings tend to stay. Cabling obviously stays, air conditioning obviously stays. Furniture goes, unless it is built-in. Commercial leases are pretty much always contracts between corporates, so they do have a lot of leeway to vary terms, etc (as opposed to residential tenancy agreements, where the govt tries to protect tenants from dodgy landlords by having a pre-defined and required set of terms) so the parties can of course specifically contract to include or exclude specific fixtures, etc. By default (ie: at common law), the tenant's fixtures rule applies.
IANA.U.S.L, but if your law is anything like ours, then the cabling belongs to the landlord.
We paid for it, it's not theirs, so.. get out the hacksaw
You paid for it, it is theirs, and by getting out the hacksaw, you're opening yourself up to a lawsuit with the landlord sueing you to make good the damage to his property, and you'll lose the case.
Strange, but true!
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I don't know if this is the same in all states/countries, but here in Charlotte, NC for you to pass your electrical inspection after you do any remodeling of office space you have to remove all abandoned wire. In Phase 1 of our remodeling they removed about 100lbs of wire, in the second phase contractor failed the inspection because of "excess abandoned wire in plenum". And in most cases when you move into a new office space you will remodel it to some extent, so in regions where the building code is up-to-date it really should not be a problem.
Life is Short and Hard like a body building Elf
Companies install plenum simply because it's NOT a fire hazard. Plenum saves lives.
i consulted for a tenent in a building built before 1900. I made a board i have hanging in my office of each generation of wires. The oldest was a private extension for a railroad, not phone but telegraph, then there was western union telegraph, then teletype. The fist telephone demarc had a total of 36 pairs, this was at a time all of Portland has less then 1,000 phones. I followed those piars to the roof, i found the remains of where they then went to open wire. any way add fire pairs, then every generation of telco up to abandoned early fibre !
you think you could cut all the old stuff ? One of the pre 1920's telco pairs still had dial tone !
I spent two whole days trying to find room to feed
CAT5 from the basement to my cleints offices.
Someone would just come along and say all of that cabling in space is a fire hazard.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
"The fact is that the actual danger is fairly low, but when it's your family member that get's turned into medium steak - crispy on the outside with a warm red center - suddenly the $50,000 to remove the cabling seems like a small price to pay"
Obviously you have never met my family.
At a talk, I heard it said of the University of California Los Angeles medical center that after a major earthquake (perhaps it was the Northridge quake; I don't remember), the structural engineers figured that the building came close to collapsing (which would have been disastrous, since at the same talk I heard it said that it was the second largest building in the US after the Pentagon) when the earth shook, and it was the network cabling that ultimately made enough of a difference to hold it together. I hope someone can authoritatively either corroborate the story or consign it to urban legend status.
Unfortunately, when the tenant moves out they're going to want to take all their switching equipment with them. That leaves a load of loose wires which may or may not be labelled.
So put a "buzzer" on it at the endpoint site, and sniff for it at the patch-panel site.
A commercial cable installer will already have the equipment. (If you don't and are too cheap to buy your own, use a literal buzzer-and-battery to make radio noise and a battery-powered pocket radio to sniff for it.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ten years ago, I heard that the almost filled cable trench at the X-Y building containing cables overlaid on top of obsolete cable generations from years before (undocumented and untrusted) was over 30ft deep, dating from the late 1940's. Any update ?
> No, you just use the higher rated cable for the entire run. Fire codes are *minimum* requirements. Assuming "riser" is rated higher than "plenum", then you can use "riser" rated cable wherever "plenum" is called for.
Not correct here, because according to code, riser and plenum cables are not interchangeable. They do different things (plenum is designed not to give off toxic fumes when it burns, and riser cable is designed not to burn). It's not a matter of "higher" ratings, it's that they're different.
Virg