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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."
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'd think the cables block the airflow, rather than start it??
Leaving ethernet points in = $0
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.
Come time to use wiring in an office you have to search through bundles of cables to find the ones you want. If the cable you find doesn't work you're left wondering if it's incorrectly labelled and comes out somewhere else, or is simply broken. If it's broken you've got the expense of laying in replacements, if it's mislabelled you've an expensive analysis job to undertake.
So, no, using someone else's second-hand wiring is not zero cost.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
Maybe. Remember that the policy here was that the cabling was to be removed after each tennant left. That means it is simply a case of removing any cable from the duct, as opposed to removing just the defunct cables from a tangle of spaghetti. I suspect that the latter would require a considerable quantity of time, and therefore money, to accomplish.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
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.
Rather than try and salvage the metals from the cable, it would almost certainly be better to sell off the old cables as cables. Getting at the metal would involve getting rid of all the insulation etc. Selling them as cables means (at worst) putting new connectors on the ends.
There might be legal issues preventing resale of some cables (toxic materials, fire regs. and so on).
- Blah blah blah, missing scientist. Blah blah blah, atomic bomb. -
Not nearly, if you factor in the cost of downtime caused by careless cable removal disrupting active cable in place. Beyond simple laziness, that's probably the reason I've seen the most for "It's not hurting anything, so just leave it in place."
Our raised-floor facility across the hall from my office had 20 years worth of accumulated mainframe cabling, network cabling of three different Ethernet generations, and power cabling from 400 volt to 12vdc. And that's just the copper. Never mind three different kinds of fiber, 2 types of conduit, grounding cables (for the mainframe) complete with large ground planes glued to the subfloor, and several hundred serial cables (you know, DB-25 at each end).
It's a miracle we had any uptime at all during the period when the system shop was removing all the dead copper.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The looters were taking the electrical wiring. It holds lots of nice, heavy copper that you can get good money for by weight.
Kriston
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.
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.
we recently completed a re-cabling job of over 130 drops. somewhere in the neighborhood of 4KM of cable was installed, and about the same was removed. our interconnect charged us about $2400 CAD to remove the old cable, and they did it on a weekend so as not to interrupt our employees.
we've done this in a few areas in our building; removing the old cable each time at a marginal cost.
we remove the old cable mainly because it looks aweful! we are in an old building with no walls in which to hide cables. ladder-racks are used to transport the cable and they would get overcrowded if we were to keep the old stuff around.
what's the point of keeping old, solid-core, CAT5 around? some of it is so brittle that it literally breaks apart if you bend the cable!
plus, our interconnect recycles the cable and gets a few buck back for the copper -- although not much from what i've been told.
When I ripped out my Romex (steel covered cable) it was quite nasty... however, we had the drywall all down and pulled the plaster & lath down too so it was quite easy to see where things were sticking. Alot of the cable was cut in many places and removed from around the staples.
You will need to check with a local person as the codes vary all over the country.. not everyone enforces the NFPA rules or adopts them as local ordinances. Fire code in the US is a massive mess... thus we have the highest fire fatality rate in the civilized world...
Only part of the reason for the Iraqi stripping of cables was economic, as intact wire probably has value as intact wire in third world countries. Also, if someone can make even a couple of bucks over there for a couple of hours work, it is probably more profitable than the alternativess.
Electrical wire is really the only common type of cabling that would be worthwhile by any stretch of the imagination that would be worth tearing out of a building. Also remember, that much of the looting was vandalism pure and simple done by people caught up in a fever of lawlessness.
I had a reasonable quantity of old pitch and fabric covered #8 electrical wire, about 500 feet or so of the stuff that ran out to a barn here. I took it to the local recycler, who offered 3 cents a pound for it. 60 pounds of the stuff yielded a mere 2 bucks, which didn't even cover my gasoline to drive to the recycling center. I suspected there was at least 30 pounds of copper in there, which is worth about $25. but didn't want to go to the trouble and mess of burning the old insulation away. Proportionately, Cat 5 would be an even worse proposition, as there are probably mere grams of copper per foot of this cable. The heat of burning the plastic off of the cable would probably oxidize the little bit of copper it contains anyway.
Some of the older 10 base 5 cables might have a second life for us ham radio operators, as it is equivalent to RG-8, a very common coaxial cable used in 2 way radio systems. Anybody who's got a few decent length runs (100 foot or so) of this stuff could get a few bucks for it at a hamfest. Don't bother with any oddball stuff, as it has little value for secondary uses.