October 19, 2007
180 feet, 4 90's, 3/4"
Have two projects going -- a new call center at 21061 Western and repacking people at Birch. The people at Birch were using whatever dialtone they could swipe, but will finally be getting a proper system -- a Cisco Voice over Internet Protocol. Very nice phones, top quality both physically and performance. They ordered a conference room speakerphone for the conference room (duh!) which presented me with a slight problem -- I had no Cat-5 cable to the conference room. I had a 25-pair cat-3 telephone cable, and four cat-3 4-pair cables; but at 200 feet neither could handle the required 100baseT. The four pair cables were run just tossed over the ceilings willy-nilly and wouldn't pull. Obviously tangled somewhere and not usable to pull in a cat-5 quad. Which left the fat telephone cable in it's conduit. Which also would not pull. Since, as I later found out, it was 180 feet of 3/4" conduit with four 90 degree bends and a couple or four wiggles. From the terminal room it was up, north, then west. At the conference room was up, north, then east -- hopefully in line with the pipe coming west. Just where it entered the conference room, over the ceiling, was a slip-union. {GRIN} Break it open, access the 25 pair cable, and it PULLED! ah-HA!!
Set up the reel of bundled four four-pair cat-5 cables:
The telephone cable I cut slit the outer cover, removed the 25 pairs, laid the quad inside the cover and taped it closed -- giving me a smooth transistion from old cable to new with no bulges or edges to catch on anything along the way.
Pulled the old cable at the break in the conduit until I had enough new cable in the room to reach the jack location. Pulled from the jack location 'til it as all in. Put the conduit back together, closed up the ceiling. Took stock of what I had done. Blogworthy. 213 feet (jack to jack) of quad cat-5 cables from the quad wall jack in the conference room to the cat-5 patch panel in the terminal room. Posted by Paladin at October 19, 2007 05:02 PM