Bulding Wiring Standards

Telecommunications (both voice and data) is a critical rcsource for most companies. Over the last few years, building cabling has increasingly been recognized as a vital (and costly) part of a company's telecommunications system. In this context, the Electronic Industries Association (EIA) (Figure 1) has undertaken the task of issuing a series of standards covering customer premise cabling. The purpose of these standards is to insure that a building can be pre-cabled without knowledge of the particular types of telecommunications and computing equipment and/or applications to be installed later. There are a number of other organizations which issue standards that affect building wiring. These include: - Underwriters Laboratories (UL) standards are primarily concerned with safety issues, such as electric shok, fire hazards, etc. - The Insulated Cable Engineers Association (ICEA) issues standards relating to cable manufacturing, color-coding, etc. - The National Electric Code is also primarily concerned with safety issues. - There are a number of international standards bodies (e.g., ISO/IEC JTC1/SC25/WG3) which are starting to address building wiring. The EIA/TIA standards are unique in that they were the first to consider building wiring as a system rather than a collection of individual components. These standards place requirements on the architecture and performance of the entire wiring system to ensure compatibility among different applications and equipment.