Good Stuff [was] Re: shameful-cabling gallery of infamy - does anybody know where it went?

Thu Sep 13 06:11:28 UTC 2007

On 9/12/07, Ross Vandegrift <ross at kallisti.us> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 08:36:45AM -0400, Joe Abley wrote:
> > This (the general subject of how to keep real-world cabinets tidy and
> > do cabling in a sane way) seems like an excellent topic for a NANOG
> > tutorial. I'd come, for sure :-)
>
> This is a topic that I am quite interested in.  I have no telco
> background, but got started in a shop on par with many of these
> photos.  Around my current job, I'm the guy who is known for
> whining about crappy cabling jobs.
>
> Does anyone know if any good resources on best-practices at this sort
> of thing?  I'm pretty sure that others must've already figured out the
> trickier stuff that I've thought about.

Telcordia. There are age old standards that are related to CO
construction and service delivery. In most non ILEC facilities,
Bellcore/Telcordia standards are hybrid. Two of the best hybrid
implementations I've worked with are Level(3) and MCI.

> For example - some of the posted pictures show the use of fiber ducts
> lifted above cable ladders.  Why opt for such a two-level design
> instead of bundling fibers in flex-conduit and running the conduits
> adjacent on the ladder?

I'm not sure what you mean. If you are talking about ladder separation
and fiber trough, there are multiple, solid, engineering reasons. The
optical trough is used so that you don't need to touch bundle and
potentially cause an larger outage with damage. The trough allows fast
service delivery of xcons as well.  Third tier bundle is used as
simple a path route, never to be modified, generally a route from the
OSP/ISP termination to splice shelving.

If you have access to Level(3) facilities, walk around a bit and look.
IMHO, they have the ultimate hybrid CO/datacenter hybrid design.

-M<