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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?
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!
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!
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
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.
The standard practice is to recover assets when leaving a building. Just like a company takes it's servers, desktop computers, chairs, and desks, it also takes the relatively expensive network hook up equipment. This generally means the patch panels and the network racks. One rack, 6 or 7ft high, entirely populated with patch panels could easily have cost $4,000.
Now, in some cases, people are jerks and do not take the time to cut the wires as close to the patch panels as possible. I have seen some cut where the wires enter the room (ussually through the ceiling). This makes re-using the wires impossible since there isn't enough left to do the hookups.
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.
...
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
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.
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
What else are they going to do, break the bloody windows?!
:)
Bill G already took care of that.
The logic being it's their cabling. The last startup I did, the previous tenants had done exactly that. The cabling was cut within about two feet of the ceiling. There was a bit of slack in the cables, though, and we were cheap, so we wound up with our patch panels right up at ceiling level. Saved us a bunch of time and money upfront though any work afterwards had to be done on top of a ladder.
The real fire hazard is due to the insulation on the cables burning or melting and emitting all sorts of poisonous fumes. Older cables are very bad for this. I shudder at the thought of a serious fire in some of the buildings described by posters- if the whole floor void (and presumably the risers) are chock full of all that plastic.
*Some* modern cables are rated LSZH or LS0H- meaning "Low Smoke Zero Halogen" which shows that cable firms are considering this issue.
Actually, "plenum spaces" are supposed to have plenum cable, according to fire code. Plenum cable doesn't burn, it just smolders.
If that's what you meant by "inflammable," sorry. The word is "nonflammable."
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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?
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.
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...
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.
Which is why building codes require special jacketed cables for use un plenum spaces (ie: plenum rated). If you install non-rated cables in the plenum space you are breaking the law, and could be liable to future tenants for remove of the non-complying cabling. Yes, that fact is usually ignored since nobody pulls a building permit when retrofitting low-voltage cabling and therfor there's no inspector to make sure it is done correctly (or, at least, to code).
As a structural engineer, I deal with folks every day who do things "wrong" but they've never had a building fall down. I call it Luck, as defined by the myriad little things which don't have any reproducable/quantifiable strucutral value which - in the real world - tend to help out a bit (friction, drywall screws, adhesive on gun-nails, etc.). Combine that with safety factors approaching 3 and the rarity for a building to see a code-required load (usu. less than 2% chance per year) and builders and owners get away with a lot of $#!+.
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 (and would have been a small price compared to the settlement or jury award).
Well, I didn't mean for this to sound so gloom-and-doom. Remember that crispy human with gypsum and ash crust requires multiple failures - bad/blocked exits, non- or sub-functioning alarm and fire supression, ignition source, flammables. Keep your buildings well maintained and you can handle a bit of non-compliance.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
We also take all of the locks with us, and the security system.
This is simply an example of how businesses and individuals work quite differently in an area where people assume things are much the same. Businesses rent the space, not usually the facilities (ie phone, security, etc), so most of the phone equipment, including those lines they're cutting, were put in by the business, and are taken from place to place. For many people it's just not worth the effort to take the lines completely out, so cutting them is far more common, especially since re-using the line would be almost out of the question in the new building (though the new tenant of the old building could re-use the line if you don't cut it too close).
We don't rent space expecting cat-5 cable to be in place, we rent it knowing that it will be easy for our people to put cat-5 in. We don't expect the phone line to be routed to the room we have designated for the phone equipment, or that the security will be up to our requirements.
If it was a home bought and sold by an individual, you have to leave most of those things in place because the buyer expects them to be there. However, if you spell it out in the contract, you can still cut away the phone and cable for whatever reason, though, as an individual, you also expect those things to be in the place you're moving to (which, again, companies don't expect to find when they move into a new business space).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
They mentioned one of the reasons in the article: concern that a competitor might be able to use the infrastructure.
Unfortunately, building managers are usually part of the problem. Take this example of a startup I dealt with. We moved into a basement suite of a large office building in the center of town. The building management knew what our business was, knew we were likely to need telephone lines. But when we finally moved in, guess what? There was no cabling from our suite to the phone room. We had to install about 250 feet of plenum-rated phone wiring.
Now, here's the problem. So, time comes for us to move to larger facilities. We were going to sell the cable as scrap. We ask for access to the common areas so we can retrieve the cable. Guess what? Building management now considers the cable "theirs" and won't provide us access to the phone room to remove it.
What did we do? Sawed it off at the entrance to our suite. Why? Because the building management wouldn't either compensate us for the price of installing the cable nor allow us to remove it. We paid for it, it's not theirs, so.. get out the hacksaw.
Unfortunately, this is far more common than you'd believe. Building managers often look at high-tech companies as a cheap way to "update infrastructure" in older buildings without paying for it. In our case, the entire building, as a result of a lot of dot.com activity, now has fiber between floors, CAT-5 throughout, multiple electrical entries, etc. Who paid for all these upgrades? Not the building, that's for sure.
Take all the unused cabling and thread unused AOL Trial CD's and you have yourself a great way to trim that Tree!
Dolemite
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